Seeing that Animal Collective's Avey Tare and Black Dice's Eric Copeland are roommates, it's little surprise that the Brooklyn pair end up collaborating between their chief commitments and touring schedules. As Terrestrial Tones, the duo generate the kind of prickly, experimental soundscapes that you might expect from such a meeting of creative minds. There's more evidence of Black Dice's rickety, shorn racket than Animal Collective's pastoral improv however, and after getting feisty with the contact mics, Tare and Copeland are left with an effervescent thicket of electronic bleating and arbitrary sound effects. Over this, they add layers of indecipherable, barbed lyrics that sound as though they're sung from an underground lair soaked in blood and brambles. This can be challenging at times-- for example, when the music loses momentum and drifts into an abyss of white noise. For the most part though, the seemingly endless boundaries and subtly propulsive rhythms draw the listener into an engaging world of manipulated samples and shimmering loops.
Dead Drunk was recorded while Copeland and Portner were living in Paris last summer. Just how much their environment affected the output is unclear. Unlike CocoRosie's La Maison De Mon Reve, which the Brooklyn sisters also recorded while living together in Paris, Dead Drunk doesn't exactly conjure up images of winding streets and champagne sunsets over the Sacre Coeur. It's more reflective of the hyperactive grit of the weekly flea markets, where the pair apparently spent a lot of time prowling through the maze of discarded records, dismantled Soviet era electronic equipment and junkyard bits and bobs.
This third album is much more concise as a whole than the group's 40 minute "single," Oboroed / Circus Lives. Some of Terrestrial Tones' previous output has sounded like little more than two mates smoking a few joints at home and playing around with their computers, and is only likely to appeal to either serious fans of noise music, or Copeland and Portner's other bands. Dead Drunk stands its ground as a more interesting compositional entity. The tracks entwine and inform each other-- malleable rhythms budge, contract and twist in a way that ties each track to the next in unexpected ways. The flow between second track, "The Sailor", right into the fifth, "Magic Trick" is just one example of Dead Drunk's compelling continuity and focus, and sieve Terrestrial Tones out of the murky realms of an on/off side project and into a field where the quality of their efforts match those of their main bands.
