"I want to be an architect/ To build with erosion." That's the Berg Sans Nipple's Shane Aspegren, invoking the title track of the cut-and-paste indie duo's third LP. The lyric serves as a mission statement for the record, as Aspegren and Lori Sean Berg spend its 46 minutes tightly editing decayed or decaying sonic fragments into shuffling, uneasy musical statements. Dead drumbeats smack tightly, while vocal tracks are spliced, sliced, and diced until they sound like power tools. Samples of celebrating children mutate into seasick weathervanes; steel drums are fashioned as crashing disturbances. Overall, the mood is harsh and claustrophobic-- a relatively far cry from the open-air post-rock climate of the Berg Sans Nipple's 2007 album Along the Quai. You get the feeling that if you brought that comparatively splashy record into contact with Build With Erosion's atmosphere, it would curl up, and become shriveled and tan.
Build With Erosion's unstable, fever-soaked nature owes heavily to the pair's experimentation and employment of reggae and dub textures; granted, said textures are known more for sky-touching looseness than for jarring rhythms and compulsive self-editing (the latter might explain why it's been four years since their last record). It's dub's reputation for static, uncertain dread, then, that Build With Erosion most closely evokes. Aspegren's expressed meteorological concerns in "Weatherman" are slathered in echo, as a snapping beat and ghostly tones stay in close orbit, while the electric squeals of "All People" honk under layers of shimmered vocals and scuffed melodic vamping. In a sense, the stylistic left-turn is reminiscent of Broken Social Scene peripheral member Andrew Whiteman's Apostle of Hustle project, who put out a similarly Jah-jacking effort with 2009's Eats Darkness. While that record did itself in with self-serious formalism, the BSN are here taking borrowed elements and embroidering them into their own electronically jittery style. In other words, they make it sound natural, a trick that's not easy to pull off when incorporating other cultures' elements into your own musical experience.
Naturally, it's the more traditionally post-rock moments on Build With Erosion that fail to rouse interest. The soft-padded, mallet-led percolation of "Dead Dinosaurs Rule the Earth" may contain Along the Quai's DNA, but here it interrupts the LP's flow; the cooing closer "Pink Rays Sugar", on the other hand, doesn't feel like it belongs anywhere in the band's repertoire (it'd probably make good on an American Analog Set record, though). Mind you, these sound like complaints, but in a way, they're compliments; Build With Erosion is the kind of enjoyably sound-damaged effort where stylistic intrusions feel like just that, and not much more.
