Black Dice
Beaches and Canyons
[DFA; 2002]
Rating: 8.5
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-dye 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, adding
beats in clever ways throughout the compositions in order to lengthen
them, 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 "Favorite
Things": the crowd in Japan, stunned by an hour-long take on
Rodgers and 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. The
song breaks down, like any good trip, into its most primal elements
at the end: 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. "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. "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.
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.
-Mike Bernstein, April 23rd, 2002