As vaguely post-rock bands go, Tristeza are perhaps the most perfectly rated. The San Diego act emerged from the Southern California hardcore scene nine years ago, and has established an entirely indifferent reputation for exactly three things: lineage (GoGoGo Airheart, Crimson Curse, the Locust), family tree (co-founder Jimmy LaValle quit in 2003 to devote time to his more renowned Album Leaf project), and a trance-conducive mix of rock complexity and downtempo rhythms and tones. Sure, Tristeza aren't really changing lives or branding revolutions, but plenty of bands would go begging for such auspicious signifiers. They've always been perfectly and appropriately pleasant, and that's generally been all right with just about everyone.
Ostensibly, En Nuestro Desafío marks another attempt by the band to raise the stakes. A 21-piece CD and DVD pair, Desafío is the logical follow-up to 2005's double album, A Colores. It represents another linear progression, too: Most of A Colores' nine tracks were among the band's most insipid, and during the first eight cuts on Desafío-- together, clocking in at under 19 minutes-- you can practically hear this band falling apart. Each track is a collaboration between four or less of the group's seven members, with each piece only held together by member James Lehner and an insistence on static rhythms that plink through gauzy Neu! textures and light-noise sonics.
The problem begins with the opening "Común", which initially sounds like one of the band's more aggressive climbs. But complete rhythmic stasis lets the tide collapse on itself-- and just when things start to peak, they fizzle into an underwhelming fade. Larsen does this stuff with more compelling sounds, and other bands, such as Tortoise, have done it with more intriguing motifs.
Desafío is replete with postulates but depleted of beliefs, the work of a band whose ideas and inclinations still haven't come to grips with the technological tools and technical wherewithal for capturing them. Nearly every Tristeza album-- from their best work on 2000's Dream Signals in Full Circles until their previous nadir on A Colores-- has felt that way, but the complacence here is especially flagrant. The accompanying DVD-- 11 evidentiary, undeveloped vignettes (and the nine-minute, repeated closer) set to inchoate video manipulation-- doesn't help. The Spanish countryside takes on saturated color when buried beneath a run-of-the-mill "paint" effect on one short, and film of Pacific Northwestern woods takes on psychotropic, neon tendencies when Luis Hermosillo applies an effect that iDVD would aptly call "groovy." It's the kind of stuff erstwhile hippy parents on a train tour of Europe would e-mail their children back home just to prove they were, indeed, using the MacBook and digital video camera they got for Christmas.
But, both in the audio and visual realms, Tristeza do find something promising when shunning their newfound love of the miniature: Though the title track-- a collaboration between Lehner, Hermosillo and Christopher Sprague-- is as largely uninspiring as its neighbors tonally, its cohesive, distended workmanship and ideas on horizontal modulation offer some intrigue. Two drum sequences nest in and out of one another, providing a wobbly but fecund foundation. The band's textures-- at last-- do more than idle.
Perhaps it's that track's inclusion as the conclusion of both discs that suggests a more promising next for Tristeza. Then again, as it's one positively notable piece out of nearly two dozen failures, it could as easily mean that Tristeza have spun out of their formerly satisfying full circles.
