People tend to think of Sian Alice Group as shoegaze, but really, they're a post-rock band. One can hear traces of Tortoise and Godspeed You! Black Emperor in their sound, and there's an aesthetic and structural seriousness to how they present themselves on record. Take last year's mostly very good 59.59, which featured time-stamped instrumental intermissions separating each batch of its rock-leaning tracks. As pretentious as that may have seemed, it was also a convenient way for the group to divide its avant-garde material from its more straightforward pop songs. On their latest album, the less accessible and stylistically varied Troubled, Shaken Etc., Sian Alice Group look to combine those approaches in a more seamless manner.
The desire here to more fully incorporate the experimental-- heard in the record's deeper explorations of free jazz, krautrock, and swirling instrumental passages-- makes for a far more ambitious outing than its predecessor. Troubled, Shaken Etc. eschews verse-chorus-verse structures, hooks, and easy melodies, and generally seems to ignore the fact that the attention span of today's listener is growing ever shorter. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that-- and, heck, mp3-length focus is nothing to be proud of-- but there's an aloofness at play here that makes the album difficult to penetrate. Part of the reason is that Sian Alice Group tend to sound best at their most straightforward, and Troubled, Shaken Etc. excels during its simpler moments.
It takes some time to get there, but the record finds its footing on ominous rock tracks such as "Close to the Ground", where frontwoman Sian Ahern's commanding vocals sit upfront in the mix and play off the foreboding arrangements behind them. A similar approach works on "The Low Lights", a fairly uncomplicated pop-rock number with rolling percussion and Ahern at her most vocally charming. And while I wouldn't mind if a few of the record's vocal-less cuts and slow dirges didn't make the final pressing, "Longstrakt" (note the "k" for krautrock!), repetitive and drum-heavy with blippy keyboard embellishments, is a welcome addition. Moments like these show a band versatile enough to work comfortably within several genres, but the record's low-energy moments elsewhere draw away from some of this success.
Troubled, Shaken Etc. has a tendency to fall back on the morose, and tracks such as "Grow Again, Repeat" and "To Thine Own Self Be True", which are nearly funereal in tone, lack a certain spark that keeps me away from the "back" button. Ultimately this is a question of taste-- and plenty of folks like their music slow-moving and somber-- but the general avoidance of rhythm on some of these cuts poses a problem for me. It's a bit like the middle section of Grizzly Bear's recent Veckatimest, where the album just seems to be aching for a bit more soul. Of course, Sian Alice Group are a British avant-rock act and this brand of grave studiousness is sort of their calling card, so it would be silly to expect, say, a funk record the next time around. But I do think that a general loosening of the reins would go a long way.
