New albums by Pan American, the project started by Labradford singer/guitarist Mark Nelson at the tail-end of the 1990s, have steadily become scarce. It's been four years since the last one, the ambient leaning White Bird Release. If that record was all long, wintery shadows, this one brings in a touch of warmth from earlier Pan American recordings. The slight shift in tone is mirrored by a change in personnel, with Nelson bringing past collaborator Steven Hess on board as a full-time member of the band. Labradford's Bobby Donne contributes bass on certain songs, helping underpin the harsher sounds by providing a soft bedrock for the players to lean into. Cloud Room, Glass Room was designed to be played live, suggesting a few frayed edges might have cut into the sound. In fact, the opposite is true, with Nelson's fondness for clear-eyed production values still firmly intact.
Those subtle adjustments from the last Pan American record to this one haven't stopped Nelson from tooling around with customary fascinations. An undercurrent of dub sometimes swells up, the influence of Kompakt-style minimal techno can be felt. The way Nelson can beautifully guide a song via the peaks and troughs of his guitar playing must surely come easy to him at this point, although there's never a sense of him lapsing into auto-pilot. As such, anyone looking for a way in to Pan American would be wise to start at this relatively accessible point and work backward. Still, part of the charm of this project is the way it's staged in isolation, with little apparent concern for who is listening or where this music might sit with their peers. That sense of being loosely unanchored from the world gives Cloud Room its alien appeal, making its instrumental drift ripe for personal interpretation.
The "live band" approach taken on this album makes it feel a little more human than some of the heavily processed material that's come out under the Pan American name, such as 2000's 360 Business/360 Bypass. It's especially apparent when Hess's percussion is given space to breathe, either as a root to the sound on the tender "Relays" or as a guiding force for the extended flashes of guitar squall on "Virginia Waveform". If that's disconcerting to longtime listeners, it shouldn't be; there's plenty of material that takes the "guys in a room" method and figures out how to make it sound like it couldn't have been made that way. "Fifth Avenue 1960" is a highlight, full of electronics treated with cavernous echo that fill out an undercurrent of menace that sporadically surfaces elsewhere.
Like most of the material Nelson has released over the years, the primary takeaway from Cloud Room is a notion of the control he exercises over his work no matter where it takes him. He can work around the white-light loops that flicker through understated pieces like "Glass Room at the Airport", or he can amass a towering stack of splintery discordance on "Laurel South". But there's always a sense of an assured hand guiding it all, bringing each part together to serve the greater whole. Even his wilder guitar pieces never reach the point where it feels like he's letting go and there's a sense of order being maintained, of advances being carefully spun through a strict framework. It feels good to be back here again, in a place that's become increasingly rare, but one flushed with a warm feeling of familiarity.
