Electronic musician Christopher Bissonnette returns to the music scene to offer a follow-up to the brilliant 2008 album In Between Words. On his latest album, Bissonnette offers a wonderful palette of varying movements and electronic treatments to create a wonderfully envisioned world that Bissonnette is so eager to display. The new album is one of Kranky's latest releases for 2014, and is certainly one of Bissonnette's most interesting releases to date.
There's a wonderful experimental nature to the new album from Bissonnette, which doesn't offer just a typical selection of keyboards and electronic treatments. There's some very careful consideration to the music present on the new album, which offers a much more interesting and much more involved branch of electronic music. Droning compositions seem to open up the way to new worlds, only to be snatched away again without a moment's notice. Much of the album has a sort of soothing effect, but even so it is an album that can't truly be categorized as an ambient record. Electronic effects, elements and ideas introduce themselves in the songs, adding specific notions to the tracks themselves to give them the character that they contribute to the overall album itself.
Christopher Bissonnette has certainly demonstrated some wonderful experimental techniques on his latest record, many of which contribute towards a very interesting album experience. It seems though that the album itself is greater than the songs present on the record, none of which seem to work well as stand-alone songs. Either one enjoys the album in its entirety, listening to each and every song present on the record, or they don't bother at all. It seems there's little room to take the songs out of the album context to be enjoyed, as they are all so relevant to the album itself.
On one hand, we can enjoy the wonderful album Bissonnette has crafted with such delicate approach, but on the other there is a disappointing element that there's nothing more than the album itself present on the record. Perhaps this is something we should have expected from Bissonnette though, who seems to work more towards crafting fully-thought out album experiences rather than individual songs. In any case, much of Bissonnette's efforts have come across brilliantly, with the new album being a somewhat flawed yet highly enjoyable album experience.
