Somewhere along the way, Friends of Dean Martinez left the lounge and moved in next door to the butcher shop. Along the way, they passed through A Place in the Sun, their brilliant, expansive 2000 album that ironically saw huge, dark clouds scudding over their trademark sun-scorched instrumentals. The outfit's fifth album, On the Shore, is something of an odd package, splitting two discs between (somewhat) old and new material. The first disc houses the Wichita Lineman EP, originally released in Europe on the venerable Glitterhouse label, as well as three live tracks taken from the Live at Club 2 EP (also from Glitterhouse). Disc two is essentially the new On the Shore album, but the material all comes from such similar headspace that the whole set winds up sounding very much of a piece with itself.
Disc one opens with the quiet, almost comforting sound of a film projector, lulling you into a false sense of security before the aptly titled "Overload" blows out your windows with a sudden burst of skull-crushing fuzz bass and acid-drenched guitar, heavier than anything any reasonable person ever would've expected from these guys. The six tracks of the Lineman EP cohere like nothing else in the band's catalogue, flowing with surprising grace from the frayed blast of "Overload" to the spooky desert nighttime of "Alternate Theme", which morphs from a lazy acoustic stroll drenched in mellotron into a soup of brooding organ and sustained guitar tones, then back again, without batting an eye. The tension of one piece feeds the release of the next and vice versa: it's an incredibly natural flow.
Though overarching mood is their primary strength, Friends of Dean Martinez are great at crafting little moments that make your ears perk up, like the spot where the texture shifts from inky black cymbals and muddy guitars to a clear, shuffling beat and Bill Elm's pedal steel spills out the aching melody of "Through the Whine". Elm's steel guitar is the band's primary voice, and he muffles the instrument's country pretenses with an approach that brings to mind David Gilmour's soul-spilling, slightly damaged lead style of decades ago. This is on heavy display on the band's live cover of "The Tennessee Waltz" later on the disc, where he mines the basic sadness of the original tale-- losing a lover to a friend-- to staggering effect. Patti Page never sounded so evocative in her entire life.
As solid as the first disc is, the second one is obviously the main course, pushing their sound in new, more abstract directions, and unearthing the band's jazzy core. "H-Hour Minus Five" rises from the deep like air bubbles from a sunken submarine, Elm using everything from his steel to Theremin, piano and the Casio CZ-101 synthesizer to create the most unsettled mood possible. It's the kind of thing I'd sooner expect from a band on Alien8, and it's wholly enveloping. "And Love to Be the Master of Hate" hardly takes a more traditional shape with its wall of dark-hued keyboards and guitar outbursts from Mike Semple; Dave LaChance's drums roll and stomp, constantly shifting the rhythmic basis of the song to affect change in the other players.
Other songs reflect the band's old Southwestern desert sound more overtly, like the swooning "Under the Waves" and the boiling "Time's Not Your Friend", where Elm's parched steel squares off against Semple's brushfire fretwork. Semple is quickly establishing himself as the most contemplative Friend of Dean, as his gorgeous composition "Indian Summer" sits heavy and cold like the desert night, in the middle of the disc, slathered in icy Chamberlin and skeletal guitar parts. His other contribution to the second disc, "Cahuenga", feels a little more like the sunrise, with Elm's organ breathing softly in the background as Semple's simple guitar parts meditate gracefully, pushed along only by a simple, steady pulse on a bass.
By the time the sun's up, Friends of Dean Martinez are pretty far from where they started out years ago, before Joey Burns and John Convertino left to form Calexico and the remaining members took their tongues out of their cheeks. They've developed into a band that can effortlessly extract the beauty from emptiness, while taking you on some pretty strange detours in the process. I'll always recommend A Place in the Sun over their other albums (unless, God willing, they make a better one in the future), but On the Shore is a two disc set full of refined, potent ideas, merely less expansive than their most daunting, celebrated effort.
