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| Track list: 1. The Howling 2. Burial Sounds 3. Folk Song Oblivion 4. Crocodile 5. Halfhound 6. Left Hand Wave 7. Island 8. Throwing Bones 9. The Whole Is on My Side Running time: 54 minutes Released: 2009 |
This album really struck a chord with me when I first heard it. I discovered it, I believe, through LastFM - probably a Scottish tag radio or something like that. The thing that stands out is the way it veers from dark and brooding to happy-clappy or jaunty. It's a little bit unique.
Opening track The Howling was my introduction, a six minute work, with a sort of growling threat in the snappy drums and growling, electronic bass. There is more light in the clear, accented vocal. When the lead guitars come in, that light gets happy and bright, even as the lyrics get darker. The song, with its talks o ghosts, and the album as a whole (Halfhound is strongly suggestive of Werewolves) have an undertone of urban fantasy about them. As that is one of my favourite gaming genres, its fair to say I rather like this. So much so I bought the t-shirt; I still have it, but rarely wear it any more - a bit tight and a little faded, it had the classic "vase or two faces?" image in pink on a black field.
The pace of the track drops for the final choruses, this has a more nervous atmosphere to it, the stately pace finding room for the darker tones in the music to prey on worries. I prefer the "full speed" pieces though, and find this a little tacked on. We dive into Burial Sounds, which suprirses me by reminding me of the Bastion soundtrack, with stark beats and a twang that evokes the wild west in places. In a similar vein, it sounds a bit like it could be a Borderlands soundtrack piece. Spoken works muttered over the evocative bass, top end with that sway and reverberating quality to evoke exoticism. There is, again, a snap to the drums that I find works really well, and the almost choral nature to the low end vocals - oohs, or ohs between the drums, bass and twangy top end - is very atmospheric.
My favourite track on the album, by a mile, is Folk Song Oblivion - this has a growl to the bass in the verses, a chanting vocal, a very nice darkness to it. Then we hit the chorus and that all bleeds out to be replaced by a nice melody, a lighter vocal, and a happier tone. I have written of this before, of how I appreciate the contrast, but I genuinely feel like this is my go-to example of how to do it (to please me). Sitting and listening to it now, the song feels like it is lacking something though - I think because the majority of my listening is done whilst driving I get by on overall theme and tone rather than specifics. Sitting still doing nothing but listening and typing out words based on what I hear, I find myself thinking that each phase of the song maybe lasts a little too long, or that the base patterns are actually a little dull in their construction. The overall effect is still great, but don't over-analyze it.
We are back to the soundtrack-like material again. Crocodile is instrumental, it has sounds that evoke crickets or cicadas to set the scene, and a driving combination of bass and drums to build upon it. Again we see the dark-light contrast, as the treble parts are very high against this thrumming backdrop, little lines of hope in the murk of the swampy sound built up by the structure. There is a nice progression to the melodies too, they start small and soft then grow into a bolder presence with greater clarity, more complexity and a stronger statement against the rigidity of the bottom end. It's a tune to get your feet tapping - it has one of those rhythms that you want to tap along to. When the driving climax appears and the bass structure changes, the tune takes off - like a camera zooming right out then panning over a forest scene, or following a break-through moment when it becomes clear everything is going to be alright. There is still a thrum in the bass at this point but it has been harnessed for the force of light. I almost forget the length of this tune, because it wraps me up so much.
This is a lazy Sunday morning, but I feel it is not really the ideal time for this album. The growl, the graphic violence of the lyrics for Halfhound... this is nighttime music. Darkness swirls around this track in particular, but there is a stridency to it, a firm, unwavering quality to some of the top end notes that give the impression of standing up to that beastliness. When I realised what the lyrics were for this tune, I guess I started looking for symbolism more in the rest of the album and noticed the running fantasy theme. It is gaming fodder, to the point that I would be quite surprised if the key creative elements of the band weren't roleplayers. The Howling has ghosts, Halfhound werewolves, Left Hand Wave references spectres... and on this listen I am finding little moments of triumph, like the soaring climax of Crocodile that fit the narrative beats of a game session. Of course, this could be me bringing my own biases to bear, but there is a layer of theme here that I haven't come across that much; I understand that is more common in some genres of Metal, but as much as I hate genre-typing, those have never really been my thing. Certainly I have found it rare in indie-rock like this (or perhaps more pertinently that I like).
Island drops the growling undertones, it goes stark - pleaful vocal and a lone lead guitar picking a loose melody. It feels more like a shipwreck than a bountiful paradise but it is a world away from what went before. There are Laika-like twangs to the strings - reminding me very much of the more Hawaiian themed tunes from Cosmopolis with respect to how out of place they sound given the origin of the band. Here it's more the context around this tune that makes it stand out, with Laika & the Cosmonauts its more of a clash of expectation (borne of lack of information on my part) against their Finnish nationality. For all that, I find this song very much the dullest of the songs on Checkmate Savage, exacerbated by its extraordinary length - almost 9 minutes. There is none of the grubby threatening drums, darkness-inspiring bass or sweet, sweet contrast here. There is little interest in the song content. There is not the tight, constrained by length, sharpness to offset the WTF feeling from the switch of tone. It feels less like a palette cleanser and more like an unwanted interlude.
Thankfully it is a single track problem. The energy comes back with Throwing Bones, and this definitely has more echoes of Laika and the Cosmonauts in the intro - less spangly, but similar energy. It also reminds me of the final track on The Good, The Bad & The Queen, with a subtle hint of a gradually building tempo, though I suspect that here it is more my mind being tricked, whilst in Albarn's masterful track it really is a picking up of pace. The similarities with that track end there, but it sets enough of a tone for this piece that even as it devolves into unwise use of nonsense vocals, the underlying structure retains the interest. I am fundamentally quite a lazy person; I love tracks like this that find a way to inject energy into my day and get me feeling like I want to be doing something.
The counterpoint to that is that when such tunes finish there is a danger that you feel enervated, drained and on a come down (with thanks to the lyrics of The Whole is On My Side). This last tune feels like an anticlimax with its slower pace and more gentle landscape. In some ways its a great thing for an outro to do - close things down in an ordered manner - but at least with the context of this morning, I would have rather ended on the high. Our closer is not a bad tune - I actually rather like the lazy rhythm it settles into around the 5 minute mark, with a drifting, loosely tethered top end and a regretful vocal, but the switch to this relaxed structure - especially with Throwing Bones snadwiched on the other side by the overlong and under-interesting Island - is a bit of a faux-pas to my mind.
Overall though, I still really like this disc. Whilst this post became a bit too much of a blow-by-blow, I think that is actually a tribute to the group: each song provides something new or different to think about, and compelled me to pen something as a result. Even the shorter tunes had enough to support comparisons or ideas and enough interest to compel me to communicate that.
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