Music Blog

Laura Gibson should be a familiar name to fans of the Portland music scene. Her 2006 debut, If You Come To Greet Me, received accolades from both The New York Times and NPR, and this young singer/songwriter has made appearances on opbmusic's In House and Live Wire.

I liked the album well enough, but it felt a little slight to me. Gibson's distinctively light voice felt too adrift in even the best song's arrangements. Like Zooey Glass's cigars, she needed more ballast to prevent her songs from leaving the ground and disappearing into the stratosphere.

Thankfully, Gibson has found Tucker Martine, a talented producer who has worked with such compositional heavyweights as The Decemberists and Sufjan Stevens, and who has helped counterbalance her musical approach on her upcoming release, Beasts of Seasons (out February 24th on Hush Records).

Martine and the laundry list of collaborators add so much texture to Gibson's songs - the washes of feedback and ambient drone that sneak underneath the melancholy opening track "Shadows on Parade", the woozy country spin of "Sweet Deception". Gibson's always had the talent, but now she has the tools and the maturity to make it shine.

Where Gibson spends much of her album stripping free of the anguish of the past, sound artist Ethan Rose often sounds like he revels in nostalgia. Previous works have seen him working with bygone noisemakers like player pianos and music boxes, twisting their output through mechanical tweaks to their insides or simply deconstructing the sound waves on his computer.

His new album Oaks (being released January 27th by Holocene Music) concentrates on a Wurlitzer Theater Organ from 1926, which has been installed and played in the skating rink at Oaks Amusement Park. Rose meticulously recorded the many tones and noises from this famed instrument, turning them into lush, hypnotic soundscapes.

In some tracks, you can hear the real or constructed grind of skates rolling along. In others, the whistles and bells are forefront. In every song, the sounds from the vintage Wurlitzer mutate and warp with thin reedy movements giving way to fat, bulbous and overwhelming measures of noise.

The work appears futuristic but really it feels steeped more in a melancholic wistfulness that is ripe for appropriation by a smart filmmaker. (Gus Van Sant was forward thinking enough to include some pieces of Rose's Ceiling Songs album in his 2008 film Paranoid Park.) Until then, whatever images this album evokes will be entirely your own. Don't be surprised if you find yourself mining the past for some mind's eye accompaniment to this stunning collection.
 

Tagged: Best of 2009, Best of 2008