Outside of the electronica, avant, and singer-songwriter realms, projects helmed in solitude-- especially those not looking to obliterate long-established forms-- are low-return propositions. Bob Log III's one joke was really never that funny, and someone needs to let Keller Williams know that he's not a guitar innovator. Wait, is Victor Wooten still playing that bass solo?
But if the phrase "one-man band" rings alarm bells, don't give up on Manyfingers just yet. The solo project of Bristol, England's Chris Cole-- who has collaborated with Crescent, Movietone, and Matt Elliott-- isn't a showcase of his virtuosity, even though there's plenty of it. On his second album, Our Worn Shadow, he's an unimpeachable drummer as well as a capable pianist, cellist, and accordionist. His music hints at Vivaldi's lilt, Ligeti's playful melodrama, and Portishead's dynamic ambience.
Using over a dozen instruments, Cole records simple, short-phrase melodies and nests them, paradoxically crafting moving, triumphant wholes from meddling, inconsequential minutiae. On "This Tar Won't Hold", for example, hammered xylophone, pizzicato cello, violin, bowed xylophone, antiphonal bowed cellos, guitar and triangle chase a four-note piano phrase. By track's end, most of those samples have been reversed, just a simple piano and shrill violin pushing counter to it all; it's a marathon march of perfected baby steps.
Cole lets the layers breathe, expand and retract, but he always keeps them manageable, wrapped loosely enough to dazzle but tightly enough to survive the high-motion long haul he intends. Cole's climaxes are deserved but understated, reminders that emotions don't flash between black and white. Opener "Some Shield" builds for almost five minutes before Cole kills all of the loops, allowing only one-- strings in reverse-- to emerge alive. The push to that sudden transition is managed through a tension whose release feels earned and honest, as though things either had to explode or collapse. Even the eight-minute "3 Forms", which claims the most aggressive crescendo here, does so only after seven vibrant minutes of balks and half-starts, a distended rising action of criss-crossing piano lines, looming strings and brass crashes eventually culminating into Shadow's most commanding moment.
Of course, this is the exception: Cole's reliance on spacing and elegance elsewhere will leave some stranded, waiting for the staggered stacks of sequences and loops to thrust them from a resultant cliff. And, it's true: Shirk the details, and it will seem as though, over Shadow's 49 minutes, Cole builds on monotony, a pretty script of nothing from a writer afraid to commit. Variety, superficially, is low: Guest Ira Olfstad adds vocals on just two tracks (aside from producer Marcus Dyer and a guest cornet, she's the only other contributor), and only "A Remark"-- a brief piano and drum shuffle-- doesn't develop over think-piece strictures.
Even so, if Our Worn Shadow suffers from anything it's Cole's over-commitment: He extends his approach of high-maintenance restraint everywhere, rarely adding a loop for temporary effect. Though one pattern may lose its eminence in the mix, Cole's highly considered and specific patterns form an interlocking, all-or-nothing matrix. Where one goes, they all usually go, and, over eight tracks, that predictable process becomes a bit too lucid. Then again, Manyfingers is only one man.
