26 December 2010

The Ghost of 29 Megacycles - love via paper planes (2009, Sound & Fury)

There can be just a small difference between authentic and generic and "Love Via Paper Planes", the debut LP from The Ghost of 29 Megacycles - an Australian three-piece, with Greg Taw (vocals/guitars), Karen de San Miguel (vocals/drums) and Matt Aitken (organ), balancing between Perth and Melbourne - could be too quickly assimilated to the later.


I discover this album backward, having enjoyed their more recent EP "The Hummingbird Dream" I decided to give another try to this work I discarded previously.

"Love via paper planes" is indeed very typical of their style of music but also disarmingly honest with heavily reverberated guitars, ethereal vocals and organ. It would be a shortcut to resume their work, as succedaneum of Kranky aesthetics. More precisely, i consider them as long lost cousins of artists like Windy & Carl, Roy Montgomery, Insides or Landing, who finally emerge to the light of the day.

This is a coherent and strong, haunted debut album and what they lack of originality is replaced by a focus on details through the monotony of a very delimited style magnified by a precise sense of minimalism. This six songs, forty-four minutes long album sounds almost like a long single shoegazing track which puts you in an hypnotic and vaporous melancholic state of mind. 

If you give them a chance and the time to convince you, they will, and even if it may sound slightly outdated you feel the are engaged on a very promising path.

The opening track, "The Cold Light of Silence" lasts almost sixteen minutes and is a slow progression around pulsating organ waves, crystalline guitar drones and a few ethereal female transparent vocal lines, like a slow solitary walk on an ice field during snowstorm. 

"Passing, Daydreams" seems even colder, surprising from an Australian band, reminiscent of the early discography of the The Stars of the Lid. Like on their EP, they become more interesting when their music is more personal and melancholic, when you feel that Greg Taw is taking the lid, like with the guitar theme of the first part of "We Are the New Romantics. “Love Via Paper Planes” is almost a mantra trying to make you rise through the slow evolution of repeated patterns.

"Dusted" reminds me of a more intense echo of the opening track. A cover of the Daniel Johnston song "True Love Will Find You in the End" closes the album with the hesitant but haunted vocals of Greg Taw reminiscent of the early Smog discography.
"Love via paper planes" is the promising debut of a promising band.



 

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