There's a not-so-hidden message encoded in composer Zach Cooper's debut album, The Sentence: "This is for us to incite stillness in our hearts and minds." That call to mindfulness, inspired by Cooper's own meditation practice, is spelled out by the one-word titles of the album's 12 cuts, which spin acoustic instruments, electric kit, and synthesizers and electronic effects into a,shifting whole that's part chamber music, part post-rock, and part musique concrète.
For a record that advocates stillness, The Sentence covers a lot of ground. It collages together many years' worth of work, from high-school home recordings to work with the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble to assorted rehearsal tapes and—well, who knows what, really. As you might guess from songs titled things like "This," "To," and "In," the individual tracks on The Sentence function less as standalone songs than as parts of an indivisible whole, and it's well-nigh impossible to tease out which bits date to which moments. As a scrapbook, the album's timeline will be legible only to Cooper, although that's presumably partly the point of the whole exercise: to explore the way musical moments repeat, echo, and evolve across the course of a life, piling up on tape in an image of eternal now-ness.
The music's tone is largely hushed, with lots of breathy wind instruments and muted electric and acoustic guitar; there are five percussionists credited on the album, but their contributions tend to emphasize scrapes and thumps and the faraway thunder of reverberant tympani—sounds used more for color than timekeeping. Compositionally, Cooper tends to tease soft melodic phrases out of dissonant, abstract passages, like drawing smooth a tangle of thread in fits and starts. Occasionally, a startlingly beautiful vista opens up: The pensive guitar and horns of "To" sound a little like Tortoise at their most sentimental. But Cooper doesn't dwell on any one idea for very long. That lyric centerpiece is followed by a shout ("Yo, play the jam! We’re gonna jam, dude!") and a two-minute run of vibraphone, cymbal, and electronics that suggests a druggy, paranoid Raymond Scott.
When The Sentence works best, it's led forward by a combination of smart pacing and surprising ideas. But the record has trouble building and keeping momentum. "Stillness," just 3:18 long, encompasses three distinct parts separated by garbed electronics and random clatter: a watery orchestral passage, a folky meditation for acoustic guitar and monophonic synth, and solo acoustic guitar bit that sounds like it was recorded on a Dictaphone. All offer nice sounds and worthy musical ideas, but lead nowhere. Too often the album seems to lack an organizing principle, a structure to make all its discrete moments make sense, and the back half of the 32-minute album drags. It's hard to maintain much investment in a record that simply rolls on of its own accord, like a stream, oblivious to the presence of the listener.
