"Recorded at home by High Places," reads the back cover of the Brooklyn duo's full-length debut. At this early point in their career, that's reassuring. High Places' profile has risen steadily in the last year and they've become a fixture at a handful of online destinations, but they're still by any measure a modest little band dedicated to a narrow stripe of aesthetic concerns which lend themselves well to home recording. Singer Mary Pearson's voice may have the range of a telephone touchpad, but she uses what she's got to get what she wants, getting over on tone, suggestion, and the occasional leap up a few notes for emphasis. Rob Barber manages all the weird junkshop percussion-- the metallic pings and wooden scrapes that seem held together with chewing gum and baling wire. The duo weaves a few wispy synths and samples around the beats and vocals, but they also leave a whole lot of space, and together it adds up to dub-kissed indie pop with a surprising rhythmic verve.
In his review of High Places' singles collection 03/07 - 09/07 earlier this year, Pitchfork's Mike Powell began by noting that High Places were sometimes compared to Beat Happening, the influential indie band from Olympia, Wash. I'm onboard with the comparison, but High Places remind me even more of a few of the groups that issued cassettes on the 1990s for the then-Seattle-based micro-indie Slabco. Now-forgotten acts like Sukpatch, Volume All*Star, and Land of the Loops (the latter sometimes featured Heather Lewis from Beat Happening on vocals), extended the realm of lo-fi, home-recorded 4-track music to include drum machines, turntables, and most of all, samplers. They made tuneful, childhood-obsessed pop that adopted an ultra-cheap, sloppy Dust Brothers aesthetic that, true to twee form, valued enthusiasm more than skill. Record collections weren't particularly deep and the loops might have been poorly cut, but those records had a mood and charm all their own. They felt handmade and personal.
High Places have broadened their palette a little, especially in regards to percussion-- the textures of which sometimes suggest the poppier end of mid-90s IDM-- but they're also clarifying what exactly a High Places song consists of. Two short interludes aside, there's a touch less abstraction here, and more in the way of song construction. These differences are minor, though, and for the most part the songs here are of a piece with 03/07 - 09/07. Single "Vision's the First..." shows the band in a very good light. Its slippery percussion could almost be mistaken for Aphex Twin circa I Care Because You Do, with booming tribal drumrolls fused to a pitch-shifted sample that acts as an additional rhythmic layer. And floating above the fray is Pearson's simple schoolyard-rhyme melody, calming intoning "Oh, how very strange," to suggest a state of wonder.
Such sidelong glances at the music of the past are found throughout this album, and High Places often gently subvert whatever they reference. The beat of the marching "Namer" nods at techno but would never play by such rigid rules, so when the kick drum and shakers pause for a second, the sonic energy of the tune suddenly seems to bubble up randomly through a crack. "The Storm" lays the reverb thick on Pearson's voice and drops out everything but percussion, invoking an air of Cocteau/Dead Can Dance-style 4AD, but High Places could never be that serious, and you never sense that so much is at stake. Rather, High Places specialize in that moment of thoughtful contemplation, that rare time when you're able to reflect a little and let your imagination wander. At such moments, your mind goes from your childhood to the future and back again, and might even pause to linger on death and the infinite, as with the flat-out gorgeous closer "From Stardust to Sentience".
High Places are a specialty item, to be sure; they aren't trying to be all things to anybody. On the basis of what we've heard so far, they aim to hint, gesture, sketch, whisper, and then step back to give the listener room to fill things in and construct his or her own meaning. The subtlety of their music, and the underlying confidence that brings it forth, lies at the core of their appeal.
