Most instrumental groups peak early and spend the rest of their careers in a slow decline. Slow Six is the exception. Private Times in Public Places and Nor'easter introduced us to the band's lush, languid, string-laden sound, while offshoots Redhooker and Christopher Tignor expanded on this template with well-received variations. These separate excursions didn't sap all the good ideas, but instead allowed the members of the group room to breathe and to express their individual ideas. Now they return to the main entity with renewed vigor. This new record sees the band having begun to synthesize the wisdom of the ages, incorporating the musicians' teachings and experiences into a coherent whole. In other words, Slow Six has just jumped from submitting well-written papers to producing a prize-winning thesis.
Tomorrow Becomes You opens with a nine-minute bejeweled beauty that has zero down time. It begins unassumingly with gentle string plonks, e-bow, simple guitar, and treated resonance, but once the high-hat and rim shots snap to attention, the band zooms off with dueling violins in a virtually incomprehensible time signature. The mind cannot easily pick out any one individual violin; they complement one another so expertly, the only recourse is to let go and allow the music to guide. The amount of vivacious melodies and hot-notes that make up "The Night You Left New York" is absolutely astounding. Each new moment arrived at is greater than the last, and it would be lovely to have any one of them played forever. The luscious climax will have one's neck hairs standing at attention.
"Cloud Cover (part 1)" recovers from the opener's vertiginous majesty by building up some curious tension, as if ice crystals are slowly materializing outward from a glacial cliff, forming a bridge before our eyes. From here the band climbs onto a grand chariot and launches across, headed for undulating landscapes. Christopher Tignor's virtuosity on the violin continues to be featured, but he never sounds like he is "soloing." The band provides the perfect, scintillating substrate for him to whirl like a dervish, allowing his violin to curl the listener's DNA like a lock of hair. The suite is continued in "Cloud Cover (part 2)," a much calmer, ambient piece peppered with subtle amalgamations of radio broadcasts, bowed cymbals, reverberating tremolo, and the reflective sighs of the violin. It's as if Slow Six is putting us at ease, singing us a lullaby it learned from the beings of Virgo.
The second half of the album takes it to another level. After a dreamy intermission-esque piece, another two-song suite begins, this time with the clinical name "Sympathetic Response System." The first part has a killer snare-led groove, underlined by a velvety, elastic hum that inflates and exhales tangibly. The sounds playing here affect the body directly, spawning butterflies deep in the viscera, but nodding one's head is the quickest cure. The drumming is fantastic, and the quality of its recording really shines through. The drums are supported by echoing and mutating samplings of themselves, done by Tignor, who has developed his own software with the focus being on live electronic interpretations of music. The creed here shuns the idea of pre-programmed beats or sounds, emphasizing the importance of everything being played or sampled live. All the supplemental sounds and studio touches on Tomorrow Becomes You are done as the music is played, making this album all the more remarkable. Obviously, it was worked on lovingly for months, but the sincerity of sound is what one remembers.
Finale "These Rivers Between Us" has an anguished upper register violin progression supported by the fender rhodes and a gentle but snappy beat. The strings are almost whiny, but Stephan Griesgraber's guitar parts the canopy with a poignant, distorted melody, and a series of transformations begin. All kinds of plucks, bows, clanks, and shuffling make up a complex sounding groove, until the violin starts dizzying itself again. The guitar and violin engage in a great mimic/call-and-response segment before the band takes a breath as it approaches the climax. The ending is the most fundamental of all the melodies and progressions on the album, and might even sound like a regular neo-classical post-rock band, if we didn't know any better. It is a celebration, each instrument doing dolphin leaps intermittently, and the sense of resolve is final. Simplicity reigns supreme, an axiom of a happy life.
This music is the epitome of clarity. The players, the compositions, the techniques: they are absolutely confident and full of life. It's a delight to behold. One can detect that these people are sober, responsible, and just don't have time to fuck around. The way the violin and the guitar play through each other is seemingly unprecedented. It is unlike anything I've ever heard, and it will send most of the grass-munching post-rock acts scuttling back to their basements to try again. This is a good thing, for we need the boundaries of our musical universe to be pushed. Slow Six are just leagues ahead of the pack. Tomorrow Becomes You is a brilliant work of art.
-Nayt Keane