"Quiet," "delicate," and "low-key" neatly summed up the For Carnation when they released two EPs (or one EP and one very brief album) after the breakup of singer/guitarist Brian McMahan's former band, Slint. But these words failed to catch the band's atmospheric raison d'être, and led the excellent self-titled album that would follow to be positively slept-on. Legacy's a bitch that way. Promised Works combines the two out-of-print EPs, Fight Songs and Marshmallows, released between the disbandment of Slint and the For Carnation's self-titled (and final) album. This re-release offers the band a chance to get out from under Slint's long shadow, but more than that, it undercuts the obstinate, near-religious seriousness with which McMahan's other projects are received, which is just maybe what casual fans mean when they reach to call Slint "overrated." Slint deserved the praise; the For Carnation could use a little more.
The unaccompanied strum of "Grace Beneath the Pines" isn't much more than a whisper, sure, but it wields silence in the same rapier way as Slint. It also shows off McMahan's preternatural sense of timing, as he moves like an off-Broadway prodigy, with every chord change just a hair behind the beat. These EP's also rescued McMahan's voice from where it had been buried since Tweez and put it front and center, which was a brave choice, a refreshing change of pace, and maybe not actually the best idea: his callow creak on blunt noir-bent lines about "crackheads and assassins and burn victims and millionaires sons" undersells them. "How I Beat the Devil", however, quickly dodges expectation with an aimless little riff that bursts into a sunny, straightforward groove lasting just over a minute.
Fight Songs ended on the hopeful but still meandering "Get and Stay Get March", and were all indeed pretty tentative when compared to Marshmallows, which would follow a year later. This is the record where the stone-seriousness garnered by the cult of Slint was deflated by a much more relaxed and human approach. "On the Swing" would be the perfect soundtrack to just that, a slow pendulum rhythm with lolling delivery from McMahan over gentle plucking from former Slint-man Tim Ruth. That cuts quickly to the mechanical groove of "I Wear the Gold", only interrupted by multi-tracked "ooh" and intermittent feedback. It's an experiment in tension, no more and no less.
In contrast, "Imyr, Marshmallow" puts patient sing-song vocals over sprightly children's show keyboards, the oddest and most surprising texture they'd ever pulled out, and its flat delivery remains creepy as shit. While "Winter Lair" and "Salo" were just as gaunt as later Slint (though the former pricks the ears with some rising sirens that would foreshadow the subtle atmospheric details of the self-titled), "Preparing to Receive You" digs an unhurried and unpretentious groove, the careful release of the guitar's low-end making it, if not quite hypnotic, a jam with some purpose.
I don't know what precipitated the jump to Matador for these two EP's, but having them under Touch and Go's auspices now just makes sense. Wary and even distrustful of aggressive self-promotion, Slint and their peers had curious listeners coming to them, and were it not for the label's saintly, stubborn insistence on keeping their records in print, Slint may never have developed the audience they did (Spiderland was actually-- surprise, surprise-- a slow grower). These two EPs are fairly divergent and don't make perfect sense on one disc, but it's a minor complaint when compared to the greater good: Now people will have time to revisit the For Carnation, and every last corner of the catalog is now available and accessible for discovery and re-discovery.
