Drawing a Cat with the Aid of Two Coins_音乐专辑
Drawing a Cat with the Aid of Two Coins
表演者: Marlinchen
专辑类型: 专辑
介质: 数字(Digital)
发行时间: 2010
出版者: self-release
专辑简介
http://www.marlinche
http://www.mp3.com.a
I’m a sucker for the use of stringed instruments in modern rock music. As a great fan of epic musical vistas and blatant, bombastic melodrama (which makes me perfect fan boy fodder for the post-rock genre to begin with), I’m eager to be emotionally manipulated by sad swells of violin, the mournful bowing of somber cellos, and the solemn, haunting ghosts of single piano notes skittering across a song’s pond-like surface. It’s evidence that, even three or four generations down, all of us children of Euro-immigrant families are still jonesing for some classical with our rock. Sometimes, as in the case with Mono, it accents the shrieking guitars and thundering drums quite nicely. Once in awhile, on rare and stunning occasions, it replaces those elements altogether to take center, rather than complimentary, stage, often in beguiling fashion.
So when I began to bone up about Marlinchen, this little-known Brisbane five-piece I had never remotely heard of, for this review, I was excited to detect the presence of those sacred ingredients. Less ominous than the Godspeed/Set Fire to Flames continuum, less classically-frigid than the airtight compositions of Rachel’s, much of the career-spanning Drawing a Cat with the Aid of Two Coins is delightfully eerie, suitably experimental, and emotionally uplifting. Sure, the work carefully spins itself out beneath plinking synths and Dirty Three violins, never reaching a crescendo, but it’s still fine, lonely-rainy-day music; it’s long-walk reflection sort of stuff, not change-one's-life-and-question-the-world music. But that’s a compliment. It’s built that way, to subtly shift and color one's moods rather than overwhelm them.
“Track One” is alight with shivering bells and weeping strings for all of its four-and-a-half precise minutes, while “Track Four” is awash in disorienting laser-synths that give off a disquieting, nervous air (ah, here’s the Godspeed influence). Elsewhere, “Track Two” is the best kind of super-serious, dark and churning downer, bleak and hopeless and absolutely thrilling for it. The only real misstep this fine retrospective makes is with one of its two bonus tracks, “Sinking.” The presence of an overly-emoting singer both distracts from the music and vaguely annoys the listener. The half-hearted operatic wailing does literally nothing that the piece could not do instrumentally. It’s a notable, but forgivable, misstep.
Regardless of this blip, this little collection should fulfill one's locked-in-the-bedroom yearning for sad, string-laden post-rock quite well. As any good career wrap-up of an unknown group should, it will make us lament the band's half-noticed demise and wonder what it could’ve done had it stuck around awhile longer.
曲目
One
Two
Three
