The record begins with a horn flourish reminiscent of the opening to an old movie or educational documentary. This is, of course, in line with the aesthetic the duo has cultivated throughout their career, excavating half remembered associations alongside nostalgia for movies and documentaries you might catch on a particularly dreary Saturday afternoon. Yet, since there is no direct media artifact to tie these sounds to, you are left with the haunted feeling of nostalgia lacking referent. Boards of Canada evoke specters with no real origin, ghosts who were never alive in the first place.
Where Boards of Canada possessed an additional element of lightness (a gentler touch, something more bright and optimistic) in the past, Tomorrrow’s Harvest is much darker project. This is a bleak album with a constant paranoid tension, never resulting in any form of catharsis. There are brief flashes of this optimism, specifically on "Nothing is Real," but they seem present only to point to their impossibility. For the most part, these tracks feel sparse and quiet, a tension pervading them throughout. Boards of Canada channels Godspeed! You Black Emperor within this atmosphere, but lacking in the collective’s climactic release. Tomorrow’s Harvest remains at a constant level, never boiling over into something larger.
Spatial metaphors seem especially apt for this record; Tomorrow’s Harvest is open, calling to mind a sort of vast emptiness. It was appropriate (and deliberate) for the band’s early publicity campaign to make use of desert images; this album generates a desolate area, one marked only by scant signs of life. Those signs of life are most evident in the garbled vocal samples that pop up from time to time, and which are always especially jarring. There is no way to make any sense of these vocal clips; they are jumbled messages with no discernible point of origin and nothing to actually tell us. We are lost in the desert with only a vague sense of someone or something watching us.
Tomorrow’s Harvest does something rare in that talking about it and what it seems to be attempting requires a discussion less in terms of what particular songs do musically and more about a larger theme. I could actually write and research quite deeply into the processes the Scottish brothers used to create these songs (degraded tape samples, live instrumentation warped to something unrecognizable, etc). Surely, BoC superfans have much to dig into with this record solely on a technical level. Still, it is first important to cite that this is a coherent whole which cannot be separated into individual songs. And in that vein, this is a solid album that doesn’t really falter in putting forward its worldview. It is a strong return fitting for a historical moment where political and environmental catastrophes leave one feeling slightly out in a desert with a vague, neverending, sense of unease.
Grade: A
My brother recommended I may like this website. He used to
be entirely right. This put up truly made my day.
You can not believe just how a lot time I had spent
for this info! Thank you!
Feel free to surf to my web blog :: pit 2014 :: http://www.blazingarticle.com/ ::
First off I want to say terrific blog! I had a
quick question in which I'd like to ask if you don't mind.
I was interested to find out how you center yourself and clear your mind prior to writing.
I have had a difficult time clearing my thoughts in getting my ideas out there.
I truly do enjoy writing but it just seems like the first 10 to 15 minutes are generally lost simply just trying to figure out how to begin.
Any recommendations or tips? Appreciate it!|
Stop by my weblog :: zeznanie podatkowe, http://www.stingit.se/index.php?do=/blog/2453/pit-druk/,