The decade-long career of New York trio Sightings has been mostly about expansion. They started with a big bang, playing as noisy and abrasive as a band with structured rock songs could. Gradually, they stretched that approach, incorporating some space and restraint. The melodic skeletons beneath the music's cacophonous skin slowly poked through. By the time of their fourth studio album, Arrived in Gold, Sightings had mastered minimalism, sometimes exploring small, detailed sounds that were like the negative image of their white-hot noise.
City of Straw opens with that kind of dark sparseness-- the first minute of "Tar and Pine" is all little clicks that sound more like Morse code than music. But when Mark Morgan's guitar slices through, and Jon Lockie's hybrid electro-acoustic drums lock in, the song becomes a tense, turgid combination of minimalist structure and maximalist sound. It's a mix the band perfected on their previous effort, 2007's Through the Panama, even producing a few catchy post-punk gems. City of Straw never quite hits that kind of head-bobbing snap, though it does offer a few songs you can pump your fists to. But the way it stirs the band's macro and micro sides together puts it squarely among their best efforts.
That mix also produces the album's strongest moments, both within single songs and through the juxtapositions of track sequencing. The contrasts are most vivid in a mid-album three-song stretch. The title track reiterates the tiny clips of "Tar and Pine", fusing them into nine minutes of buzzing sonics. The band's stubborn patience demands the same of the listener, but reward comes in the puncturing slam of "Saccharine Traps". There, a rumbling beat and Morgan's frantic howl (a contrast to the chilly vocal style he uses on most of the record) sound like Wolf Eyes trying to cover Joy Division. The switch from sparse to spastic is reexamined in the next cut, "We All Amplify", which might be the first dreamy Sightings track-- even Morgan's notoriously brittle guitar seems to soften a bit.
All the melting of echoey distance and full-on volume makes City of Straw a complex listen, but the album does contain a few bright, clear moments. On "Weehawken" and especially closer "Sky Above Mud Below", the band sculpts churning dissonance into rock shapes via Morgan's repetitive chants, Lockie's rolling rhythms, and the fluid bass of Richard Hoffman-- always the backbone of their sturdy attack. At this point those elements have become more like a language than a sound, a set of words and phrases that Sightings pour into song-molds like chemists concocting elixirs.
