Customer Reviews

We Move Through Weather

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm a big fan of Tarentel's 3 earlier full lengths, but I can't wrap my head around this one. The melodic, structured, evocative and emotive elements of the previous releases are abandoned for something that seems more improvisational, with unexciting results. The most serious problem is that the drummer seems to have hijacked the recording sessions -- an insistent, prominent drum beat (which might have been interesting had it lasted for one track) dominates pretty much the whole album and makes listening a numbing and somewhat unpleasurable experience.

2 1/2

Tarentel took a wrong turn in this follow through to their haunting, lingering collection "Ephemera" with an empty release. While slowly perfecting their particular brand of snail-blazed post rock, WMTW takes all the slow-paced beauty that propelled past albums and completely sucks out the melody, subtlety, and virtually all musicality as well. The few tracks that actually are developed (for this disc's low compositional standards) end up being pretentious, percussion-based ramblings, amounting to little more then a repetitious buzz amongst the bloated production. Sprinkled around the two overextended, glorified drum circle-type jams are some equally apathetic ambient excursions, leaving little more of an impression then the self indulgent, superficial audio experiments they seem to be. There are a few hypnotic pockets to dive into throughout this uninspired attempt, but for the most part a frightening lack of musical grip makes this a no go even for some of Tarentel's fans.

As more of a collective than a band, Tarentel has always managed to reinvent themselves from record to record. From the Mogwai-esque beginnings of their early recordings (compiled on Ephemera), to the noisier debut album From Bone to Satellite, to this, their biggest departure from their humble beginnings, Tarentel seems deadset on defying conventions they had once set for themselves -- an admirable goal, and one they've managed to accomplish quite well.

So why only 3 stars (er, 3.5)? While I enjoy the new, more percussive, repetitious, and formless Tarentel quite a bit, I feel as though very little of it really grabs me -- clearly, their post-rock and ambient roots have taught them the virtues of so-called "wallpaper music," but We Move Through Weather is a highly percussive, near-industrial (industrial like early Swans -- slow, loud, repetitive, and abrasive -- not industrial like NIN) affair -- one would expect the album to better fulfill the role of foregrounding the percussion and using the auxillary instrumentation to build around the percussion so as to grab the listener's attention. However, not much in particular really grabs me about this disc -- I do enjoy what Tarentel has set out to accomplish on this disc, and I do feel they've accomplished it quite well, but this sound is still in its infancy.

On a side note, the Paper White EP is quite good.

This is uneventful for me. I am always waiting for something dramatic to happen. It puts me to sleep and that is why I say slow space. Very repeatative beats.