In popular music, the past is fertile ground for plundering. In recent decades in particular, musicians have long spent time building on the post-punk era, then the 1980s. Lately, it's the 1990s' turn to be pillaged as young bands take a second look at the lo-fi sounds, synth-based R&B, and straight-ahead indie rock sounds that were the cutting edge less than 20 years ago. So what do you do if you're a band slugging it out in indie rock clubs that was actually a part of that 1990s sound people are returning to? They may not have asked themselves that specific question, but Jason McNeely and Dan Matz have answered it anyway by revisiting some old sounds themselves on Against Love, their eighth album as the leaders of Windsor for the Derby.
They released their debut, Calm Hades Float, in 1996, and it was mostly an ambient/drone record. I still listen to it occasionally, and it sounds good, though very much of its era-- there's a texture to the sound that characterized most mid-fi indie rock before digital recording setups became commonplace. It's a roughness they'd mostly moved away from over the last decade, building their albums around more traditional-ish songs as they developed the band, and relegating the ambient aspect of their work to a handful of tracks spread across each record. Against Love doesn't really mess with that format much, but from a sonic standpoint, it's a move to reconcile their recent direction with their distant past. It shows clearly in the instrumental tracks, which serve mostly as connective tissue but nonetheless lend the album much of its character. "Moon Shadows", positioned almost exactly at the album's midpoint, could practically be a Calm Hades Float outtake, with its deep, swelling loop of a drone. The album also begins and ends with snippets of scraping drone that sounds culled from the same recording.
The vocal songs are mostly quiet and reflective: "Cursed Ages" backs its vocal with a repetitive guitar figure and rolling toms, but it's when the Krautrock-y keyboards come in that it really starts to feel like it would have fit in 15 years ago. "Autumn Song" similarly looks back, with its heaving guitar, downplayed vocal, and static harmony. Some songs do keep things cleaner: "Our Love's a Calamity" is among the band's lightest songs to date, with its sing-song organ part and unison singing on the chorus. The steel guitar on "Dull Knives" is similarly bright, but the song itself feels like an exhausted relative of Mojave 3 or even Luna.
The album's tendencies-- toward revisiting the band's earlier, less polished sound and toward clean, clear, and understated songs-- lend Against Love a certain disunity. It's interesting that the band revisits some of its old methods, but the integration isn't quite total. The album's seams don't detract from the quality of the individual pieces, however, and it seems likely that in an iTunes world, different listeners will find themselves gravitating to one of the two sides the band displays here. It'll be interesting to see whether the band continues back toward the loop-based approach on its next album and what it yields.
