The most recent album by the Chicago Underground Duo-- then Trio-- was 2004's Slon, released on the heels of their "No War" tour of Europe. Right out of the gate it was aggressive and direct, turning the insistent beat of post-rock into a slap in the face to the powers that be. Two years later, the more preciously titled In Praise of Shadows sets the band back to a chamber duo, using a consistent pulse as a base from which to explore ideas and textures. Instead of a "No War" tour, this is more like a last-minute, "anything could happen" trip with a Eurail pass.
The band describes In Praise of Shadow as seven pieces that should he heard as a whole, and it feels like a suite, at least in the sense that each track has a single function and leans on the others to cough up a whole. Of the two travellers, drummer and percussionist Chad Taylor is the intrepid one, launching each track and bringing all of the momentum to the album. By contrast, trumpeter and electronics manipulator Rob Mazurek hangs back-- either because he's busy exploring, or because he's so hung up looking for the right idea that he misses his shot. On the long title track, he acts like a colorist when the momentum invites a soloist; he rarely shouts back to Taylor's "go go go" percussion.
We've seen these sites before-- the smears of grueling abstract noise that abruptly cut off, the thoughtful chamber interludes, the martial beat behind a growling horn. The only cut that seems to surprise the musicians as well as the listeners is "The Glass House", a long, static percussion piece that envelops you like, well, sort of like a glass house, but more like a garden of endless, hanging sculptures: An eager melody on what sounds like thumb piano seems to fade away as your ears get lost in the background resonances. It's the only stretch of the album that'll give you pause.
But the rest feels too familiar-- and instead of concluding, the album just stops after a last, quizzical track. If this is the flight home after their trip, it's like those times you're too tired to do anything aside from wait for the plane and flip through someone's Time magazine; without saying it, you know that your big adventure just wound up looking like somebody else's postcards. But hey, that one glass house place was pretty wild, wasn't it?
