APSE - Climb Up

At last, it's time for Apse's second full-length album. It's the fruit of a path that leads from "Spirit" to a new, longer and more meditated conception of instrumental training. In fact, the two founders Michael Gundlach and Bobby Toher (along with bassist John Mordecal) have brought in multi-instrumentalist Jed Amour and new drummer Brandon Collins, opening up stylistically in full, out in Cape Cod (Massachusetts), to take in nature, the cycle of the seasons, life experiences, gigs, sociality. All of this is reflected in the compositional process, which yielded a handful of preparatory demos and finally the finished work, a true direct consequence, so to speak process-generated, of these carefully weighed shifts.

The music of "Climb Up" now carries something sumptuous and tragic. By this point Apse's tendency toward melodic gothic is worthy of Pil and Amon Duul. Toher's voice, forever filtered into an imperious, chant-like delivery, is one of the nerve centers of these compositions, so that the sturdy syncopations of "Rook" and "The Whip", which alternate hieratically with downcast motifs, can find a binding thread beyond mere schizophrenia. "3.1", by contrast, pushes danceable catchiness to the max, ramping up both distortion and choral fullness while pushing the explosive post-punk cadence to its limits.

Contrite or not, Apse's music is voluptuously malleable, lulled by nostalgic, ethnic or mannerist intrusions, as in the Portishead-like "All Mine", practically a danceable hit played at half-voice and half-speed, or the lunar dub-flamenco of "Blown Doors", so percussive that it coins a sort of Tv On The Radio-style black music for the age of drone music.

Keyboards and electronic apparatus are nonetheless the most devastating drivers of hysteria, and the only elements capable of derailing the songs. While "Lie" takes refuge in a typically somnambulant progression straight out of a sonata's "adagio", and "In Gold" is an alien ballad with jazzy chords and distorted twangs, "The Age" leans on a stretched-out, Radiohead-esque jungle rhythm, flooding it with random sounds and fracturing it with interruptions, restarts and symphonic ambient digressions.

The album is just as musical in the subtle, subliminal instrumental of "Tropica", a raga-like stacking of pure sonic vaults that, in its final crevice, timidly reveals a folkish little tune (making the whole thing even more hallucinated). Another masterpiece is the slow requiem of "Climb Up", built on a rhythmic swarm and bursts of organ, before spilling over into an opening of angelic choir.

Only Nick Cave, Nico and a few others have done as much to revive and reinvent the dramaturgical piece. The complicated story of how the album was made is already a prologue that strips away the wickedness: it took more than three years, even before its predecessor "Spirit", which was already a masterpiece of post-rock restructuring of old relics; and then it was wisely unraveled into a saga vaguely reminiscent of Broken Social Scene. Cradled by substrates of panicked emptiness (distant pianos, ethnic percussion, hums), the first result of a long series of jam sessions, built around a grandiose, visionary spirit, enriched at every turn with elements that systematically stray from genre, a sorrowful dance between insistent tracks and meticulous clusters of searing sounds. Numerous memorable passages. Curated, edited and post-produced by Toher and Gundlach themselves, crafted with admirable care.

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01/11/2009