The Album Leaf is functional elevator-music to Brian Eno's conceptual elevator-music. It's pretty and beatific, but also unadventurous and a bit dull-- a rote version of what it emulates. In Kiln, Boards of Canada have found an Album Leaf of their own. The Michigan trio processes guitars, drums, and electronics into warm headphone tapestries of lambent melody and skittering rhythm, and while Dusker is dense with seductive ambiance, it seems like a rather disinterested seduction: plenty of stuff to flirt with the ear, little to close the deal.
On paper, it's a little bit tough to pin down what makes Dusker less than satisfying: Everything appears to be in its right place. This album is obviously the result of meticulous editing: The melodic figures are deceptively stagnant, rolling through seamlessly blended iterations of various color and tone, and the even-keeled beats are syncopated with precise yet splintering percussive embellishments. The album flirts with ambient music and dub (the sort of nebulous electronic composition we file away under the catch-all "IDM"), often simultaneously, as on "Fyrepond", with its echoing, clip-cloppy cadence, sputtering loop-ends, and glassy duotone melody, and "Rustdusk", a molten pool of swelling deep-tones and fizzy live-wire drums. Both of these compositions are skillfully turned, so why do they sound so affectless? While sonic fussiness is a prerequisite to making this sort of music, Dusker sounds like it fell prey to overzealous micro-management. Since one spitting drum program much resembles another, we count on artists to imprint some aspect of their personality into the medium, and Kiln appear to have scrubbed their music so clean that not a fingerprint remains.
Nothing on Dusker offends, but much of it is forgettable. The exceptions are the tracks where Kiln doesn't rely on boggy rhythms alone to hold our interest, but enlivens them with emphatic melodic content, which makes for more balanced compositions. "The Colorfreak" is enhanced by a lively down-sweeping tune, adroitly capering across stereo channels. The hushing "Airplaneshadows" glows with a sprightly yet recessed piano theme, and the staticky ringtones of "Arq" are closer to Dntel's indie-rock-in-electro-clothing than anything IDM. For what it's worth, I think the Album Leaf gets a bad rap-- sometimes, all you need is some pleasant wallpaper, and they're great at plastering up the stuff. Ditto Kiln, whose staunch formalism works against their music's conceptual strength, but bolsters its modest functionality.
