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| 4AD | discogs.com |
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For centuries, singing was considered somehow different from playing a musical instrument. In recent decades, this distinction, which some would dismiss as arbitrary, has begun to erode.
The human voice comes pre-installed as part of the standard operating system, its diversity of shades and textures unparalleled in any extracorporeal instrument. Entire subgenres have spontaneously sprouted, devoted to sampling and slicing, repeating and underscoring this singularly versatile application. Professional Englishman James Blake pours generous volumes of melancholy into his Grammy-nominated work, indulging in rich, forlorn colours, while on the more Teutonic side of the spectrum Christopher ‘Sohn’ Taylor of Vienna is busy looking bleakly stoic and windswept and frowning a lot.
Sohn has commissioned a choir of android duplicates to perform on Tremors, each with a voice as thin and feeble as his own — I sass him not; this is feature, not a bug — snugly suiting his tendency to lament about being cowed and intimidated and overwhelmed. Having outsourced the onerous task of existing, Sohn has stepped away from the regular passage of time to contemplate, and thereafter to monologue.
Over the course of the album, Sohn peels apart sheets of greys: from the mercurial ripple of ‘Bloodflows’ to the pearlescent swirl of ‘Artifice,’ from the silvery droplets of ‘Ransom Notes’ to the cold slate shards of the title track, it’s all very slick and polished and is really very quite nice indeed.
Niceness notwithstanding, Tremors is still somehow ephemeral, altogether smaller and flatter than it appears from a distance; a cardboard city; a half-empty mug. It is difficult to divest oneself of the nagging notion that a more experimental producer could have made substantial improvements by indulging in a little trollopery. As with much electronic music circa 2014, that saucy minx dubstep was wobbling around nearby, and Sohn is one of many who waggled eyebrows furtively in its direction. With a little wining and dining, Tremors could gouge deeper on those rumbling basslines, spin higher on those elliptical arpeggios, and smelt the wanton hiccoughing spurts of iron ore on ‘Veto’ into something white-hot.
Alas, it was not to be: Sohn contents himself with coquettish eyebrow-waggling.
What luck that he plays an instrument that largely leaves the hands and face free to emote as usual, unobstructed by metal or wood or horsehair.