WINDSOR FOR THE DERBY - Against Love

Dan Matz and Jason McNeely are by now used to stirring up curiosity with every new release, since over fifteen years of activity their Windsor For The Derby have proven capable of navigating the many changes that have swept through the "indie" constellation, indifferent to passing trends yet very much responsive to shifts dictated by their own sensibility and by the different musical worlds they've brushed up against along the way.

It would be superfluous here to retrace every transformation the band has gone through, all the more so since this time it's the band itself that gathers, in the new "Against Love", a multifaceted survey of much of what they've expressed over fifteen years of honorable career.

So, having partly eased off the new wave accelerator of their last two records, the band returns with its eighth studio album, offering a composite interplay of guitars, keyboards and acoustic shards, ambient-cosmic journeys with an antique flavor, and melodic sketches fully channeled into proper ballads.

It seems the themes of loss and the regret tied to love, around which "Against Love" is built without ever giving in to easy rhetoric, come together in a work that is at the very least two-faced: on one side, the instrumental tracks, shaped by reverb, dilations and reiterated notes, dusting off the glories of "Calm Hades Float" with a vaguely kraut sensibility and sinuous, discursive touches; on the other, the songs, further split between analog-psychedelic twists — which, especially in the album's first half, conjure memories of Spiritualized and Stereolab — and slower, more hazy melodies, which translate the same dreamlike visions into an intimate dimension, not without decisive acoustic incursions that might recall the latest American Analog Set.

It's precisely the greater melodic definition found in these latter tracks that stands out as the most remarkable element within the now-familiar stylistic facets of every Windsor For The Derby album. This is particularly evident in the second half of "Against Love", where we find an unprecedented density of songs, gradually stripped of their initial acidity, taking on the form of an unsettling bedroom ballad ("Dull Knives") or being enriched with romantic arrangements in soft pastel tones ("Cursed Ages").

The album's variety and its explicit reconnection with the expressive restraint of the band's early work make "Against Love" a commendable effort despite a clearly deliberate lack of cohesion, which nonetheless, in the long run, never manages to go beyond a simple revisiting of their origins through a sharper melodic sensibility. Still, the colorful sonic journey mapped out by the album, moving between psychedelic threads, ambient gusts and crystalline acoustic miniatures, can only come across as enjoyable, especially for those well acquainted with the history of this fine American band, which over the course of its long career has certainly earned less recognition than it deserved.

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14/07/2010