That album title is lifted from Mark Strand's excellent 1963 poem, "Keeping Things Whole", as concise and fitting a meditation on space, waste and transience as there ever was. Laika's album, their fourth, could never hope to be as succinct as a fifty-five word poem, but with only 10 songs and 42 minutes, it tries.
Named after the first dog to be slung off the Earth, Laika is the brainchild of Britain's Guy Fixsen and Margaret Fiedler. Wherever I Am I Am What Is Missing marks their first studio album since 2000's Good Looking Blues, but that four year gap is a mirage; Fixsen acknowledges in the bio that the majority of the music for this record was, in fact, recorded in 2001. It's not a cheat, but given that Laika are the type of band that tends to offer relentlessly small variations on one specific theme, it's close. Some bands like that need serious time apart to stay interesting; hell, most need it to get interesting-- time not to marinade, but to grow fissures, to break through the fortress of that one specific theme and chip away at its nature. Still, unless we're counting minute variations (and we're not), Laika's nature hasn't changed much on Whatever I Am.
The painting of a snow globe on the cover of 1999's Sounds of the Satellites is a useful image to invoke when describing Laika's music. Consisting of crisp, shuffling grooves, swirling keyboards and Fiedler's icy vocals, there's a specific motion and temperature to what they do. That this is pretty much a constant means their albums are different like snowstorms in Buffalo are different than snowstorms in Reykjavik are different than snowstorms in Prague.
With this record, I found myself listening less for Laika's melodies and above-ground ornamentation, and more to their grooves and bottom end. The duo are, contrary to received wisdom, much better with rhythm than they are with melody, and Wherever I Am is passable in this regard. As exemplified by tracks like the kinetic "Fish for Nails" and the fidgety "Falling Down", the record is punctuated by all sorts of stereo pings and timed delays that make it an interesting textural listen. But ultimately, Laika make pleasant music that's difficult to be passionate about. At best, it succeeds as a low-impact tint, a chilly motorik electronic that swirls around the room for a while before settling and melting away into vapor before you even realize it's vanished.
