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The Letter E The No 5ive Longplayer Released in 2000 8.2/10 Styles Complex Instrumental Experimental Rock Post Rock Song Highlights Alushta Better Days Plains |
The tone for The No 5ive Longplayer, the debut album by Brooklyn based instrumental quartet The Letter E, is set by the opener "Alushta." The song gently unwinds layer at a time, starting with drumstick clacks, then backing guitar, eventually launching into it's gorgeous melody, performed very impressively in an alternating pattern of 7/4 and 12/4 time. This sort of technical, layered playing is evident throughout the album. Each track tends to consist of a combination of at least 2 guitars, usually alternating the focus of the music by fading in and out of prominence as the song progresses. Add to this further layers of drums, soft brass, pedal steel, cello, accordian and vibrophone (not to mention the occasional third and even fourth layer of guitar sound) and the music takes on a very impressively blended style. The best thing is that this style comes across sounding particularly structured and precise, never messy or awkward. The second and third tracks have a similar feel to one another, and are both enhanced by the occasional volume increase and cymbal crash. This early in the album, everything is still quite subdued and gentle, so these occasional lifts in energy (which are used very sparsely throughout the first four tracks) gives the album a nice feeling of gradually lifting into heavier territoty. By the time they're halfway through track four, "Mary Bahtyarli," the listener will proabably have noticed that the album is just about as pleasant and innofensive as music can get. On many other albums, this level of, lets call it musical prettiness, could spell suicide, with the whole thing coming off as unsincerely sentimental (not to mention dull). The Letter E, however, manage to make it sound, for the most part, endearing and completely enjoyable, due to the ambitious nature of each track. It's hard to dislike anything so layered and complex, which still manages to come across being so simple and accesible. As the album moves into it's second half, the style changes slightly. The group still go for the complexity of the first half, but make significantly more use of the soft-loud-soft aesthetic. Even though the band seem to excel primarily during the more quiet moments, this does give the album a nice level of variation. I'm very interested to see what these guys do next. |