[reviews] afe117lcd
alistair crosbie: musicforshipwrecks

Seeing as this was released in October 2008, I'm a bit late to the party. That said, I still wanted to offer my thoughts on this tightly focused ambient release. Indeed, much of the problem seems to lie in a too strict adherence to the song titles themselves and to the concept of the album as a whole.

Much of the album did indeed sound aquatic, troubled, and melancholy, and yet, perhaps because of the timbres employed, I generally felt like I was half-watching a movie of a shipwreck or looking at a stylized drawing of one, at a remove from both the art and its subject matter.

The most gripping portions of the album, for me, were the distorted guitar swells in "Saltwatermusic," but even these seemed too regular in their repetition to have much visceral impact.

Perhaps in melding the words in each title together, Crosbie seeks to imply that the music and the nautical object are inextricably linked, I'm not sure, but each time the album ended, I felt that the music had moved further from its antecedent.

[Howard Martin]