Cul de Sac rose up in the early 90s in Boston. The press surrounding their efforts always commends them for avoiding the grunge scene ascendant at the time, as well as the more staid course of their post-rock contemporaries in the years to come. But despite all their Eastern song titles and instrumental tunings, it's doubtful the quartet fell that far from the proverbial tree. They've always been the rock-n-roller's improv band; regardless of the number of bassists and drummers they've gone through, the rhythm section generally perseveres as the frame on which guitarist Glenn Jones and electro-wizard Robin Amos weave their psychedelic tapestries. In recent years the band has seen an ill-fated collaboration with John Fahey, and 1999's justifiably praised Crashes to Light, Minutes to Its Fall.
The music on Immortality Lessons was also recorded in 1999, at Brandeis University as part of WBRS' live music series "The Joint". As the story goes, the band arrived in the midst of a stagnant, humorless summer day and proceeded to set up haphazardly, not expecting much from the cramped foyer they were to play in, nor the college radio DJ. Upon playing back the tape weeks later, however, they discovered that the performance was remarkably well preserved. According to the liner notes, you'd think the band had stumbled on a milestone of modern mathematics, but a few listens reveals all they could have hoped for: a nicely balanced, warm tone that captured the fluidity of the set. As a document of the Cul de Sac experience, it stands better than their previous collection of studio outtakes, I Don't Want to Go to Bed.
The vaguely Eastern explorations of Glenn Jones' open-tuned guitar begin the set. Robin Amos issues an undercurrent of electronics from his synthesizer, rustled up by Jon Proudman's cascading rolls and cymbal-showers. He provides the transition to "Enhoft Down", a brief percussion interlude, and it's surprising how resonant the drums sound for a live recording. The title track brings us back to a signature Cul de Sac move: wrangling speed bumps out of the bass, unleashing the guitar to skid across the surface. The band sounds a little taut here, as if their enthusiasm got away from them, but bassist Michael Bloom's vibrant scales guide the group back down. "Tartarugas", Bloom's composition, contrasts a busy beat with the slow howl of synthesizers and his bass.
All the elements seem to settle and the band really begins to groove by the fifth track, "Frozen in Fury on the Roof of the World". Jones' intricate fingerpicking uncoils in spirals, finally coalescing into one of the few melodic motifs offered in the set. The desolate electronic landscape in the background returns in "The Dragonfly's Bright Eye", one of the album's highlights. The ten-minute epic starts off with just the gentle dribble of the guitar, but soon it ascends rapidly, prying open a Pandora's box of swarming synthesizers and electric burble. It's a shame the fidelity wasn't high enough to capture this maelstrom perfectly, but the lo-fi sound adds an appropriately blurry edge to the inspired "Liturgy". Amos samples a muezzin-like call-and-response chant and carefully feeds it through a delay pedal.
"Blues in E" closes, an eleven-minute lullaby, more patient and restrained than much of the band's work. The dusky ambience reminds me of the liner notes, where Glenn Jones opines that "ours have always struck me as evening ragas-- music for after dark." Cul de Sac may not offer the eternal enlightenment implied in the album title, and these guys aren't exactly comparable to John Zorn and other gods of the improv scene, but their ecstatic instrumentals will definitely appeal across lines, from space-rockers to jam-band enthusiasts. As with most of Cul de Sac's recordings, a slightly sentimental tone pervades, somewhere between forward-looking and backwards-glancing. And occasionally, that's all the uplift you need.
