BOOKS - The Lemon Of Pink

The reaction to mediocrity is almost certainly, and almost always, found in simplicity. "The Lemon Of Pink" absorbs the same concepts and lays them out on a fabric woven from the same figures seen and heard on the previous "Thought For Food", but it does so by unspooling itself through sound collages, assemblages of tiny details and quotations.

A bare-bones description of the music on "The Lemon Of Pink" would run more or less like this: the right hybrid of electronics and acoustic instruments, a style that recalls Gastr Del Sol as much as any technicolor dream of David Grubbs, achieved through collage, through spoken (but never sampled) word, through the beguiling energy of cello, and through the rhythmic openings of guitars, whether acoustic or fitted with just 4 thick, heavy-sounding strings.

Is that all? No. Because you need to know how to tell melody from harmony, image from description, epiphany from sensation: all dichotomies that do justice to an album meant to be experienced by letting it flow, allowing it to move freely and take its own time.

Tracks like "S If For Everysingh" make peace with electronics because they humanize it, rendering it so imperfect that it's no longer possible to tell instrument from hardware, sound from synthesis string. The loop is conciliatory, and the rhythmic skeleton is held up now by reversed sounds ("There Is No There"), now by an old guitar strummed in bluesy fashion, weaving itself and the vocals into a swirling crescendo of sound (the title track).

"Take Time" and "That Right Ain't Shit" are tracks with a markedly different rhythm and feel, yet they manage not to lose the thread of the album and blend perfectly (or rather "imperfectly") into the context.

With "The Lemon Of Pink", the duo Zammuto/De Jong squares a stylistic circle whose outline had begun to take shape on "Thought For Food", getting lost amid their own tracks and the very ideas they had proposed. That confusion has now taken the form of an imprecise sketch, and, precisely because of that, a truly sublime one.

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16/02/2009