Labels: Exile On Mainstream
Review by: Alex Hannan
The problem with the new ENABLERS album? How damn good the first song is. “Went right” has a tense scene-setting of an opening, muted guitars picking out an intricate pattern as deep-spoken vocals begin a tale: “Went right / instead of left / Out of the closing bar / And at E. 7th and C / Walked straight into a standoff…” Its sudden burst into action is buoyed by chiming guitars as the narrator “…goes fuck-fuck!-FUCK!!-fucking away / In a dead sprint, down-and-righting south / And west, south / And west, maybe / Half a dozen of them / Hurling batteries…” The story reaches an exquisite ebbed-out finale, a relaxed, emotive chord sequence flecked with cymbal pattering. It’s such a punchy, self-contained narrative, and so well evoked by the music, that it shows off the catchiest, most aphoristic side of their work early, and overshadows the more sprawling, abstract tendencies that follow.
Although ENABLERS are working with a new drummer on this LP, Sam Ospovat, he fits in immediately with the telepathically linked twin guitar partnership of Kevin Thomson and Joe Goldring. Their work is flexible and expressive, encompassing delicate twists of emphasis and baroque patterning alongside glowering sheets of sound. Together they draw on some of the tropes of post-rock while avoiding its worst drawbacks. In different hands, the same puzzle pieces could end up bloodless, exercises in time signature manipulation, but ENABLERS avoid these pitfalls partly with their sheer mastery of ebb and flow, by turns thoughtful and robust: also partly because of Pete Simonelli’s spoken word, which lends sometimes narrative, sometimes evocative wordplay, and always richness of texture.
The interrelation of words and music is particularly interesting with this band because Simonelli is a poet and these lyrics have an independent existence as written word. There’s a complexity and layering here that’s unusual in guitar music, whose lyrics usually retain simpler syntax and vocabulary for clarity’s sake. Here we have ambiguity, shifting perspectives, parentheses and nested clauses, no rhyming or choruses. The lyric sheet is absolutely necessary to get a sense of what’s going on, since hearing alone doesn’t give a listener enough of the cues necessary to get the picture. “Walking away is a simulated act of contempt, / a leap away (and what a leap: last night’s clothes / pressed to the body– airborne!– and a glad little bastard at that) / but in a quiet garden, under a too-bright sun, / contempt is just an overbearing lack of the right words.”
Simonelli often achieves impact by dropping just the right intriguing remark or idea into lulls in the music, but at other times he can seem out of sync with its tone, as in the gathering intensity of “She calls after you,” in which the song’s late urgency seems out of step with the introverted thought-delineation of the lyrics: “there’s an unexpected grace in moving on, / in those words to be. They’re rarely ever used for any other reason / than to take up a role, to be somehow above all the insouciance of manhood…” The forceful opening of “The percentages” is another example, Simonelli bellowing the first words to match the band and then subsiding: “IN THE HALLWAY!… she turned toward him…” That’s not to say these two songs don’t have their highlights, like the delicately serrated, almost steel-drum-like guitar tones of the former song contrasting with the delicate tremoring threads in the background, or the textural shifts of the latter, showing a canny ability to bide time with one idea, draw it out lullingly, so as to make the sudden shift into a more emotive feel hit harder.
“Look” and “Solo” are a strong one-two in the centre of the album. “Look” wends its way gradually from a gentle rolling waltz, which typically for the band keeps on changing its footing and emphasis, to a chorus that is gentle, yet tidally powerful, Simonelli’s nasal sung vocals making a rare appearance and evoking a sleepless blinking into morning after a period in the dark, a grainy, raw dawn. This song takes up a sprawling near-ten minutes without effort. “Solo” is a lesson in transitions, an exploration of greater dissonance dissolving into swooning, sweet melancholy and emerging from that into a synthesis of the two, a tougher, climactic tone: which immediately evaporates into chiming harmonics. A succinct, compelling poem, too.
ENABLERS have kept me handsomely interested so far, and post-rock stylings usually scare me off. My attention drifts in the last stretch of the record, though. Others more in tune with the style may find plenty of interest; but for me, “Good shit” is pretty but doesn’t really bite, and the lyrics seem for the first time to be grasping for emotional depth and not quite reaching it. A tale of booze in the South, lingering on the accent of the moonshiner and lovingly evoking the texture and taste of the liquor, but then suddenly revealing that the guy later killed himself. Perhaps it’s the musical prompting toward profundity which make the lyrics ring a little shallow, like a too-obvious film soundtrack. “West Virginia” uses devices we’ve seen in earlier songs to somehow lesser effect, the stentorian voice this time seeming actorly and a little pretentious – “Somebody please fire up the bath salts! / This weather’s telling too much truth!” So I may skip the end of the album on future listens, but the strength of the earlier songs will keep me coming back, I’m sure.