In her steam-dreamed masterpiece, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison insists that, "If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it." On their first two albums for Trance Syndicate, Windsor for the Derby took this possibility for granted. Covering thick, steel-curtain guitars with enough space in which to flop around, they seemed content to play aural scavenger, assembling the myriad junk-sale parts for you but demanding your own images and vicarious frameworks. So it comes as something of a surprise that on their sixth album, We Fight Til Death, Windsor seem to carry a grudge and make jagged accusations. One can't but imagine that, if pressed, they'd now flick a dandelion spore in Ms. Morrison's bluest eye and hum something about the vacuity of the word "surrendered."
Well-played post-rock was always the bedrock of Windsor's sound, but they've added angst, a flayed post-punk edge, and new-wave organ loops to their ambition, creating a sound that should be familiar to Yo La Tengo fans, yet remains distinctly this band's own. Beginning on 2002's The Emotional Rescue, Windsor began to use vocals for more than just their innate musical timbres, and some of the foggy mutterings and inaudible wordings began to become genuinely decipherable. A subtle move away from their previous soundscapes, that album showed them reaching beyond academic musings, spawning teeth in the process, and learning how to gum at-- if not to gnash and grind-- the periphery of their sound.
Now, on We Fight Til Death, Windsor for the Derby has put those incisors to use. The band hasn't lost the ability to soundtrack your lunch-hour daydreams, but the pacing on this album never subsides into monotonous quiet/loud dynamics, and the surprises all seem to throb with enough tension and release to avoid scattershot inscrutability. Indeed, Windsor seems to be asking: What is a vacation without the hourglass grind of the workday? So once the drifting, lysergic burst of gorgeous opener "The Melody of a Fallen Tree" subsides, the sweaty humidity it creates must break. It comes like a dank, determined storm on the ringing guitars on "Nightingale", committing the unspeakable bastard mash-up of Doors-derived incandescence with the anthemic rhythms of Talking Heads.
Windsor head back to their roots on the moody "The Door Is Red". It's post-rock with a noir-punk sensibility-- too gassed with inert pleasures to ever rise to its feet-- and it uses that sangfroid refusal to fill the air with arrangements based on stillness and pensive voids. The song revels in hesitation, and while its guitars seem to want to argue the point, they eventually agree to disagree.
After the minor mid-album lull-- the inert "Logic and Surprise" and the forcibly manic "Black Coats", two songs which seem to regress to paint-by-numbers indie rock-- comes the album's most immediately charming song, "A Spring Like Sixty". Atop slow, shuffling drums and flickering acoustic guitar, Windsor creates an arid, itchy ballad that dries the sweat from the record's straining and heaving. Despite all of its unpredictable sidesteps, nothing on the album prepares you for the mechanical Germanic grind of "For People Unknown". Bouncing on lockstep rhythms and a hypnotic guitar, the song's determinedly glacial sounds are both soothing and celebratory.
Closer "Flight" recedes into the distance, sifting itself into smudgy dawns smoked with rotted leaves. The song's stinging feedback is as close to their former material as anything on the album, but it also underscores their growth. You don't need to create your own images with their efforts any longer; this whirlwind work coaxes you into one communal memory after another. Windsor for the Derby is no longer content to merely ride the air--- they're determined to suck it from the room and choke you dim.
