Hexadecagon, the fourth album by Austin instrumentalists the Octopus Project, collects eight pieces the quartet wrote and performed as an art installation during 2010's South by Southwest music conference. For each of their two performances in Austin, the band corralled crowds into a massive parking lot tent and then into a ring of eight speakers, with images designed by local artist (and Dazed and Confused star) Wiley Wiggins projected overhead via an eight-channel video system. The Octopus Project, a band obviously devoted to numbers in the past, dubbed the work Hexadecagon, the name of a 16-sided polygon and, it would seem, an acknowledgement of their hope to surround and possibly overwhelm the audience with stimuli. "If there's a such thing as a happiness seizure, be prepared to have one," Paste exclaimed. Apparently, it worked.
Reduced from its eight-channel origins to (as the band now intends) a pair of headphones, and without its video accompaniment, Hexadecagon feels like little more than a who's-who of important-to-indie-kids instrumental music. That approach-- all glittering midsections, sudden uproars, and clattering codas-- presents some worthy passages but a predictable whole. Every build, just like every collapse, feels as though modified from a textbook, meaning Hexadecagon generally delivers you to exactly where you might've guessed. The playful inquisitiveness that made previous LPs Hello, Avalanche and One Ten Hundred Thousand Million fan favorites is replaced here by a seriousness that shackles the band to their stylistic predecessors.
Hexadecagon, however, is nothing if not expertly played. The tessellating rhythms of "Glass Jungle", the stutters and starts of "Catalog", the stacking blocks of "Korakrit"-- these aren't at all simple. The band makes some nifty instrumental choices, too, whether that be the warm vinyl loop over which "A Phantasy" rises or the countermelodies that run so rich in "Hallucinists". But the Octopus Project is an instrumental rock band, not a group of garage rock misfits more dependent on feeling than faculty.
The best instrumental rock, asks, "What is this band without its chops?" and returns favorably with answers like imagination, ambition, and unrest. And maybe in the packed hometown houses of Austin, where the Octopus Project played this music surrounded by walls of speakers and screens, the synesthetic experience felt bigger than its parts or its players. But on this double LP, these eight pieces simply feel like cold readings of work that suggest past masters, not an attempt to reinvent them. If there's lysergic, swirling art overhead, maybe that missing component-- interesting, compelling music-- is easier to overlook. But Hexadecagon comes complete with colorful liner notes, not a disco ball. Guess you just had to be there.
