When a band breaks up, it's tempting to hear their final record through the filter of hindsight-- to imagine they subconsciously knew their future was finite and planted hints in the music. But what if they actually did know? That was the case for the noise/drone duo Yellow Swans, who made most of Going Places after deciding to disband in 2008. So if you hear a sense of finality, reflection, or even fate in this album, that impression has some basis in fact. It's even there in the title.
The thing is, Yellow Swans' music-- dense drones that build like narratives-- has always conveyed these kinds of concepts and feelings. What makes Going Places so great is how it transforms them from explainable ideas into things that can't be easily captured in words. When "Opt Out" rises from underwater tones into thick howls, you can feel anger and catharsis, but there's something else there, too. The long tones of "Sovereign" are clearly wistful, but that's just the tip of the track's layers. Maybe Pete Swanson and Gabriel Saloman's awareness of their pending demise added those extra levels, but it feels like Going Places would sound this good no matter what the time or circumstances.
The closest analogue to the album's effect might be cinema, where pictures and sound create an experience more like dreaming than just watching and listening. Going Places is music that plays like a movie. The duo relies more on field recordings and tape loops than before, and it gives a picturesque quality to their abstract sounds. Every moment is tactile and visual, like paint strokes that are just color on their own but together create a meaningful image. The resulting pictures are also wide and expansive, like a slow Stanley Kubrick pan or a meditative Terrence Malick nature shot. Think of it as noise in Imax.
Whether or not these cinematic pieces tell stories is probably up to the listener. But, as with the album title, Yellow Swans leave clues in the song names. On the hyper-busy "Limited Space", it sounds as if they're trying to let out every sound they can make before time runs out. "New Life"'s beatific tones convey the optimism of rebirth, almost like noise-based therapy. And the title track feels distinctly like a takeoff, its whirring drones conjuring images of an airplane's wheels rolling, engines revving, and wings tilting toward the sky.
You might not hear those exact tales in these pieces, and that's one of the album's strengths. It gives you space to discover tons of themes and ideas without limiting you to specific ones. Still, this is no blank canvas, but more like a series of Rorschach tests where the shapes are in constant motion. The emphasis there is on constant-- this may be the last we'll hear of Yellow Swans, but Going Places doesn't sound like an end, or a beginning, or anything else tethered to the anchor of time.
