Landing - Passages Through
(K)
Echoing on... and on... and on. Reverb's a fine thing, see, it just keeps going. You hear guitar parts and notes cascade away deeper and deeper into some great strange pool and then you simply want to get inside of said cascade and float. Eventually you have to turn the CD off or go to work or whatever or all that, but this being life I'm not about to protest too much, except to say that one of these days I would really like some of those lost Slowdive demos please, thanks.
Landing's 4th album is their first for K Records, and in combination with Yume Bitsu's colonization of that label I am looking forward to Olympia suddenly becoming the land of drift at long last. But such are my petty biases. Last year's Seasons and their tour only EP were both demonstrations of where the band was starting to aim for—a more direct sound in many ways, developing away from the basics of digital delay into a more complex, varied approach. Some songs—the EP especially showed this—were stripped down and very focused, owing more to Low's deceptive directness than anything else. Other songs had the feeling of constant change, a growing sense of the band's excellent improvisational strength—live appearances had the group members readily playing off each other, so no show was quite the same as the one before it.
Passages Through essentially continues these welcome trends. Adrienne Snow's singing and keyboard work both come to the fore beautifully—"Wings of Light," the extended opening number, is a great showcase for both. How her sense of texture and understated melody adds the perfect understated glaze and flow to the already lush song is quietly breathtaking. Her steady work throughout the record on songs like "Close Your Eyes, Slowly" and the nearly quarter-hour long "Breathing" makes even more of a case that hers is in many ways the key instrument whenever it is used. On the more upfront (as it were) tip, "Hold Me Under" and "Wrapped Up in Flight" relies on acoustic guitar and Aaron Snow's quietly powerful singing, while "To See You" is maybe the closest the band have ever gotten to a gently peppy though still entrancingly wistful guitar pop song.
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