"New York City is a laser light show. It is everything you could conjure, juvenile and immediate, like the overblown store-bought psychedelia of Pink Floyd: mall and science museum culture. Like a proudly brandished tie-dyed t-shirt, Black Dice dances and hums its way from a Phish concert crowd straight to the Knitting Factory by avoiding the funk, amping the jams, and turning up the volume.
Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons is full of spaced-out planetarium moments, drenched in high-pitched squeals and thunderous low end. "Seabird" is a tone poem: the repeated sound/image of flight and wings is warped until only creaks remain. Repetitive knob-turning seems to conjure animals who appear to be fighting. The frogs always win.
The album generally tends to eschew pounding hardcore rhythms, employing beats in unique and clever ways throughout the compositions to keep them vital. The drums are very effective throughout in their ability to add presence to the ongoing loops, adding a pounding heart to the web of tortured sounds and affected melodies. While the violence seems to be almost entirely washed away from their previous efforts, the impressive aspect of this LP is its ability to translate the live show for which the Black Dice is primarily known into a private show-- an ideal recording. These songs seem more like juxtapositions, blueprints, instructions.
With Beaches and Canyons, Black Dice fully embrace the chanting, pounding and moaning of the Grateful Dead: lovin' the jam. These songs, all of which I've heard played live in the past six or so months, are imminently changeable, fluid, and interesting. The songs reveal themselves in subtle ways, hiding their identities for minutes at a time, then briefly reappearing as themselves throughout the song, as a slightly repeating pattern or token sound. The songs go out of and back into themselves in a manner similar to John Coltrane's late-era renditions of "My Favorite Things": the crowd in Japan, stunned by an hour-long take on Rodgers & Hammerstein, suddenly remember what they're enjoying when the theme returns as a slurred parade of squeaked notes.
"The Dream is Going Down" is Black Dice at its evocative best. At the end, the song breaks down, like any good trip, into its most primal elements: Hisham pounds away on the drums, Aaron hums and half-sings through thick delay while Bjorn and Eric shriek and wail on guitar, voice, and effects. "Big Drop" points to Black Dice's most violent impulses, spreading seven or eight grindcore melodies over the course of nearly 17 minutes. It seems to be all beach here, too-- ebbing, flowing, and following the water. The screams are balanced with falsetto moaning, which falls into itself, collapsing, canyoning, ending.
"Endless Happiness" is a mess of recorder sounds and chiming, ring-modulated guitar, as well as the heavy bass swells for which Aaron is known. The percussion kicks in halfway through the track, and the recorder begins to sound Ayler-esque while the modulations and bass swells stay constant. The loops reach a frantic pace before dying, leaving a bed of static dry air. Air is overcome by water, and the end of the track is a thorough brain-cleaning, a nice and clear literal representation of the 'beaches' component. The collage of water samples lasts for several minutes-- a lucid translation from thought into music of a serenity Black Dice rarely acheive.
Black Dice have managed to create an album that properly illustrates the changing nature of their sound. Many groups have found this extremely difficult to achieve on tape, often sticking to formulas in the studio while limiting their experiments to live shows. Beaches and Canyons is an intense document of Black Dice's evolution-- cycling through styles and equipment like they're simple and meaningless tools, eyes on the goal of reorganizing sound and transforming it through sheer volume." PITCHFORK
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