Opposites attract. Opposites react. If you've ever taken or even pondered physics or chemistry, you've heard these generalizations. The positive pole of a magnet pulls against another's negative pole, and sodium (a soft metal that can be cut with a butter knife at room temperature) reacts quickly with chlorine (a pale green gas much more dense than air at room temperature) to make table salt. Then Human Bell-- the instrumental two-guitarists-and-whoever collaboration between Arbouretum's David Heumann and Lungfish's Nathan Bell-- is the sound of two substances with like properties entering a room, filling a room, and leaving the room. Their presence is felt, but-- in their separate, simultaneous and similar states-- they affect little.
That's not to say Human Bell, the Paul Oldham-tracked debut from the Baltimore-based duo, is noxious or even unpleasant. Rather, it's a collection of seven carefully played instrumentals too monotonous with regard to mood, composition and sound to make much of a lasting impression at all. Human Bell has its wondrous moments, like "Splendor and Concealment", which starts slow and spacious, like a rusty two-guitar theme for a field hand moseying along a stretch of barbed wire, looking for gaps in the barrier. It quickens and tightens suddenly, breaking the reverie as the guitars slip into tongue-and-groove, lick-and-complement counterpoint. "Hanging From the Rafters" works with similar two-part juxtaposition, opening through an ethereal vamp that moves with the spectral grace of a Loren Connors piece before abruptly shifting into a crusading march. Peter Townsend's circular drumming and Matt Riley's distorted washes of bowed guitar hold the interwoven guitar lines to the flame. It builds and releases, pauses, and finally erupts into the last five minutes. It's a victory march with a deserved denouement.
But "Hanging" is as close as Human Bell comes to moving its audience or to creating a new atmosphere through its own reactions. The other tracks slowly move to points of high drama only to release suddenly, self-consciously aborting ideas that promise catharsis or conversion. Opener "A Change in Fortunes" spends seven minutes climbing to nothing, and "Outposts of Oblivion" ebbs like a tide above a tiny sea of quartz singing bowls. It's constantly foreboding, but that sense-- present from the start-- just looms and never delivers. The counterargument, of course, is that these are mood pieces, and that tracks without climaxes are more open to interpretation. Ironically, the track "Ephaphatha" (an Aramaic expression meaning "to be opened") is most guilty of the tease, Bell surrounding Heumann's guitar in ghastly trumpet tones. Always on the edge of eruption, it's easy to ignore.
This give-and-retraction only reinforces monotony: Heumann and Bell compose differently, with Heumann preferring cyclical progressions and sudden arrivals to Bell's narrative logic and steady delivery. But both approaches mean these tracks all drive towards climaxes but grind into tedious halts. This half-commitment comes to a head in the closing 80 seconds, wherein opener "A Change in Fortunes" is reprised after the disc's mildly abrasive closer corrodes into a wash of echoes and refracted guitar tones. The glockenspiel's notes again twinkle above the dual crags of guitar, and the whole thing fades into the distance, announcing its own poetic significance through a musical inclusio. Trouble is, it feels neither like redemption nor realization; rather, it's just a reminder that-- for the past 45 minutes-- you've been sitting alone in a room with stable gases. Nothing has changed.
