Eternal Tapestry's first album for longtime, well-established indie imprint Thrill Jockey, Beyond the 4th Door, feels like the equivalent of a major-label debut. During the past six years, the Portland, Ore., psychedelic voyagers have released a handful of small-issue recordings on cassette and CD-R for labels like Not Not Fun, Digitalis, and their own Solar Commune. As their media of choice might suggest, those records were often rough and tumble, the sort of spontaneous, slipshod excellence that comes from putting a microphone into a room of players with good chemistry and letting the tape roll. The same even applies for one of their proper 2009 full-lengths, Palace of the Night Skies, for Three Lobed: Though its guitar jams were interesting and immersive, suggesting the careful build and balance that the best of this stuff demands, it was cheaply and quickly made. The three pieces weren't cohesive, either, dropping you into one jam and out of the other, without much regard for the whole trip.
Beyond the 4th Door, though, adds not only a pristine and considered quality to Eternal Tapestry's sound but also a cohesion that's not been there before. This expanded, five-piece lineup-- delivered here properly for the first time-- contributes to that sense. No longer just drums and guitar, the addition of saxophone, bassist, and synthesizer expand both the band's sonic palette and, it seems, its compositional mission. Culled from two hours of improvisation, Beyond the 4th Door moves in well-designed waves, never exhausting all its intrigue and energy at any given time. Closer "Time Winds Through a Glass, Clearly" is the perfect summary of all of that. The track first takes shape only with circular swaths of sound, big clouds of tone wrapping around a rhythmic plod. Without notice, though, it sublimates into a righteous three-minute jam, an unexpected coda full of classic rock gusto. Things rise, fall, drift, and rise or fall again, finally making for an Eternal Tapestry album that feels like, well, exactly that.
Don't let the name Eternal Tapestry fool you. This isn't wallpaper music, idle sound meant as background hum. Rather, these five pieces are finite and deliberate, each a smartly designed unit of something more. Opener "Ancient Echoes", for instance, is a welcome invocation. It begins just with guitar twinkle, a dozen tiny notes shining in quick succession. The bass joins with a thick tone, playing one melody over and over again. The drums come finally, holding steady beneath it all. A synthesizer offers slow, steady hums, and vocals distorted into textural washes snake through the layers like smoke. In its final minute, it finally builds past a drift, threatening an eruption that never comes. Rather, Eternal Tapestry segue into "Cosmic Manhunt", a five-minute interlude of sorts that's slightly more aggressive, with guitars finally growling.
It's also a prelude, or a functional transition, into "Galactic Derelict", the album's essential seven minutes. A blues-rock recast, its dual guitars stretch menacingly above drums that bob like buoys in a steady tide. This sounds like the version of Earth that never happened, before Dylan Carlson traded high volume for high precision. The guitars cycle perfectly between proper rock lines and squalls of distortion, so that ascendant riffs bend and blur into something bigger, something more like pure momentum. Ryan Carlile's saxophone lines rip through the background, his miasmatic streams serving as an accelerant for the band's most vital moment. They finally lock into proper rock'n'roll form, with both guitarists soloing like this is their moment in the spotlight. Almost without trying, the track becomes a perfect psychedelic blister-- headstrong and hot, five dudes marching headlong in one righteous moment. Long live major-label debuts, then: This is the sound of Eternal Tapestry finally turning its instincts into conquests.
