Consider the lullaby: sets simple melodies to simpler rhythms; sounds twinkly; native to habitats as diverse as the music box, the mobile, and the matronly au pair; makes babies sleepy. Synonymous with being soothed and coddled. Makes adult humans sleepy too, which presents a problem for bands who want to avail themselves of the lullaby's somnolent power while keeping their audience alert. Because you know, when someone says that a band puts them to sleep, they don't usually mean it as a compliment.
Azeda Booth's solution is to render lullabies on the scale of anthems. The Calgary, Alberta, quintet's starry meditations for laptop, synths, and guitars are as delicately formed and colored as soap bubbles, yet they drift with a paradoxically leaden sense of weight. They've created a signature sound that is both idiosyncratic and durable enough to sustain a whole album: Each track on In Flesh Tones is comprised of chirpily androgynous vocals (with hints of subterranean soul), ice-baths of beatific mood, and insistently sputtering glitch tracks that thread a thin wire of urgency through the indeterminately unfurling melodies.
In Flesh Tones should appeal to fans of the laptop-ier side of Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins (specifically, Adore), the Notwist, and Broken Social Scene-- maybe imagine an album's worth of "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl"-- but these comparisons are insufficient, and this is a crucial part of Azeda Booth's appeal. At a time when many popular bands' touchstones can be divided without remainders into Blogger tags, there simply isn't anyone doing exactly what these guys are doing right now. From the first fluctuating tones and galloping, hard-panning snares of "Ran"-- even before the first airy gusts of singing appear-- you feel yourself immersed in a profoundly intuitive musical vision.
Intuition seems to govern the songs' general movement as well as their particulars-- they are meandering yet memorable, a rare combination. Forget progression, this is osmosis. The syncopated lope of "In Red" flattens out into halting flourishes on the one-beat so gradually that the transition is all but undetectable. "First Little Britches" is a marvel of loose cohesion, with drifting refrains subbing in for verses, ambient tone beds for bridges, a few well-placed, shaggy claps for choruses. Furthermore, the individual tracks blur into one another cunningly-- the frictionlessly skating chords that open "Big Fists" seem shaken loose from the shuddering electronic drum circle that caps "Numberguts". This meandering quality might put off some listeners, but to my ears, Azeda Booth have figured out how to reconcile pop music's infectiousness with ambient music's nebulous aura, and have produced one of 2008's most unique and immediately pleasurable albums.
