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Anathallo Floating World Released in 2006 8.2/10 Styles Psychedelic Rock (and other stuff) Song Highlights Dokkoise House (with face covered) Hanasakajijii (four: a great wind, more ash) Kasa no Hone (the umbrella's bones) |
Anathallo's Floating World is something of a hidden gem. Released over 2 months ago, the self-released 6th album by the Michigan 7-piece seems to have passed under just about everyone's radar. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, however, its existence was recently brought to my attention. The album's opening track "Ame," sounds like a sea of clacking drumsticks, which is gradually undercut by a soft, ambient hum. It clocks in at under one minute, but drifts directly into "Genessaret (going out over 30,000 fathoms of water)," which features a dual male vocal, gentle guitar backing and sparse touches of piano and triangle. As the multi-tracked vocal harmonies slide into the background, the song takes on an especially etherial sound - it's an extremely enticing and effective opening to an album that will subsequently meander through a haze of different genres. Despite being awfully hard to classify, I got the impression that, at its core, Floating World desperately wants to be a psychedelic pop/rock epic (just look at the artwork - what else could it want to be?). All the psych-rock standards are here - multi-tracked, layered vocals, drifting, ambient guitar-work, dense instrumentation, convoluted song titles, a handful of instrumental passages, chaptered song-cycles (sequenced out of order, oddly enough), etc. The group probably wouldn't feel out of place amongst the Elephant 6 roster, despite their production having considerably more polish than the majority of those bands. The really great news, however, is that this isn't just an album for fans of 60s throwbacks. At times, Anathallo's music is notably reminiscient of other artists - artists which inhabit genres other than 60s psych-rock. The thumping tribal backing and gleeful vocal melodies on "Hanasakajijii (four: a great wind, more ash)" and "Hanasakajijii (one: the angry neighbor)" evoke memories of Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective. The murky, kitchen-sink production on "Floating World" will easily remind listeners of Tom Waits (or at least of Modest Mouse from that time they ripped off Tom Waits). The desolation of the instrumental "Inn-Bowling" brings Phillip Glass' works to mind. "By Number" even manages to pull the dirgy goth-rock of bands like A Perfect Circle into the mix, while touches of Sigur Ros accentuate the album's majestic closing track "Kasa no Hone (the umbrella's bones)." Amazingly, these detours away from outright psych never splinter the album's flow, and Anathallo deserve kudos, both for incorporating these additional styles seemlessly enough that the album still feels unified, but moreso for having the good sense to pick genres which sound appropriate and aethetically pleasing when entered into this musical combination. Additionally, the way in which Anathallo allow their musical influences to bleed together means that it rarely, if ever feels like they're openly mimicing other groups - the similarities are certainly apparent, but never overbearing. Floating World is a criminally underexposed album - a sprawling epic which is as mind-bendingly complex as it is exquisitely beautiful. One of the year's best, so far. |