For the drinkers among us, there's a familiar world between six and seven beers (give or take a few depending on your experience with the bottle) where existence seems to freeze. The slurred words foaming from your inebriated friend's mouth about the girl at the end of bar seem to echo meaningless verbiage, while faces drip into dizzied pools of spinning flesh. Or, I suppose again, depending on your experience, those same faces might contort into the hottest thing your eyes have witnessed (beer goggles, anyone?). Regardless, the point here is the landscape your mind embraces and the thin line your body walks before your world goes black and your inhibitions fly out the window. Bosch's With You most recent release, Defamiliarisation, fills that void and provides the soundtrack for such a surreal (read wildly drunk bent on passing out) episode.
A quasi-improvisational instrumental project led by a group of crazy Russians, including Bubble (on bass) and Bad_c on drums, is a description that is bound to raise a few eyebrows. Bringing with them a bit of baggage from prior projects and records, the group blends meandering, spiraling ambient passages with quiet guitar, bass, and percussion work to create a gentle, dizzying experience. Barefoot shoegazing, if you will.
As noted above, the aural experience here bridges reality with hallucination, as it drills repetitive acoustics into the listener's ears and mind. “As it is Bird,” the 21 minute opener, barely moves anywhere in its entire length, instead focusing on soft, subtle shifts in guitar blips and beeps. Rather than taking us somewhere, we're instead treated with a definition of every detail present before our eyes. Like a drunk swiveling on the bar stool before an empty shot glass, the minute world becomes gripping as the smallest details come to life: the squeaking of the stool, the knotted wood counter tops. Translated into Bosch-talk: pedaling loops and cymbal taps. It's all about depth, not destination.
The album stumbles from its seated position, stands on wobbly legs for a brief moment, and then topples into a slightly more progressive atmosphere on the second track. The percussion creates stability here, as the guitar and bass continue their shared curiosity of probing of duplicative notes and chords. It's like that moment under the weight of the influence when your eyelids close and your chin does a free-fall towards your chest.... on repeat. Not to beat the horse entirely to death, the song fuzzes itself into a miniature eruption near its end in traditional post-rock meets down tempo fashion.
This same pattern is explored in slightly different stylistic approaches on the remaining three compositions. Some times ambient noodling, other times drum-led post-rock, the group switches things back and forth, but never breaks this mold. At times the head-bobbing and shoulder-swaying passages pull the listener into a soused bubble of instrumental swoon, but over the course of the last 30 minutes, it becomes more clear that this is a group of guys who are good at what they practice and don't need it written in concrete to perform. The improvisational aspect of the album becomes a novelty and the labyrinthine of sound transforms into a straight line.
In the end, to call Defamiliarisation the score to inebriation may seem unjust and a tad churlish, but it's honestly not meant in any negative way. There's a time, place, and mental state for all music. Bosch's With You simply finds their sound suited for those fuzzy times, when all seems surreal before the chasm of supreme drunkenness swoops its black wings over your head and sucks you into emptiness. Good company for the evening, but here's to hoping you wake up with something a little more fulfilling next to you in the morning.
-Jonathan Brooks