Regardless of whoever is sitting in with multi-instrumentalists Lin Culbertson and Tom Surgal, the White Out modus operandi remains the same: daft, improvisatory pieces that spread like runaway kudzu or sputter like an overheated Datsun, often within a single song. The NYC-based duo have collaborated with Jim O’Rourke, Thurston Moore, and William Winant among others over the years, but Accidental Sky marks their first outing with Nels Cline, the inventive avant-garde guitarist who has been a member of Wilco since 2004. The result is the band’s most abbreviated LP-sized outing, clocking in at a 38-minute length so economical that the record seems to conclude almost before it’s even begun.
Given Accidental Sky’s pointedly terrestrial vibe, this brevity proves instructive. Surgal, Culbertson, and Cline aren’t hot-wiring and joyriding across the skies in an interstellar jalopy here; they’re locked outside the hangar, desperately MacGyvering some means—any means—of ingress. By his lonesome, in combos, or with Wilco, Cline is an inventive, expressive player, but his communions with White Out tend toward the quarrelous and cerebral.
Sky is at its best when it runs the risk of suffocation. "Imperative" opens as a hashed blues, then quickly descends into a dark brew of mini-riffs, topsy-turvy synth jags, and savage little drum rolls. Flutes flutters through "Under a Void Moon" besieged by clawed noise, distended guitar, and Dada-esque utterances. At moments, White Out can sound as lost in the weeds as some listeners may feel: Culbertson’s zig-zagged wails and the pair’s bells, whistles, and effects congeal into an unstable nucleus around which guests revolve, wildly.
What’s most frustrating isn’t ultimately that Sky doesn’t make it beyond the stratosphere, but that some of these songs should go on longer; they need more space to stretch, breathe, expand into stranger, deeper realms. The album winds down with "Soft Nameless Absolute", where contemplative Cline chords are buried beneath several strains of jittery, mirroring synthesizers. There’s a generous, sunburst grandiosity to the song, which is so coherent that it seems to have wandered in from an album by a different band. Given the tendency to self-edit and considering how Cline’s guitar elbows gracefully out of the fray and "Absolute" drifts to a measured close all suggests that, artistically, White Out may be nearing the end of a well-trod path.
