On These Places Are Now Ruins, Graham Richardson's (aka Last Days) follow up to last year's delicate Sea, noticeable changes are abound. For starters, Richardson has opted to step away from the conceptual art and embrace the empirical. The album's name accurately describes the reinterpretation of the artist's memories, be them distant and faded or immediate and potent, and this provides a larger arch to the album which claims to tie the works together despite an apparent lack of tangible commonality between the tracks themselves. This approach has several resonating effects on These Places Are now Ruins, the most obvious being that moods are not held onto very long, as each subsequent memory may have an entirely different emotion attached to it. However, it's interesting to note that this album is, predominantly, much darker than its predecessor, which obviously goes a long way towards unearthing Richardson's personal life. But that's a story for another time...

The buzzword for this album is abstraction; Richardson's intent becomes clear without much effort: These Places Are Now Ruins seeks to step out of the shadows of the cinematic, ambient influences that Last Days came from and instead adopt a technique that is more grounded in lo fi, organic sounds that bring in more live instrumentation than most will give him credit for. And this is a success; the abstraction couples well with the album's theme and Richardson makes it all pretty painless for the listener. Nothing dives too deeply into background music and nothing lingers in the self-indulgent area  of pretention as well. A balance between substance and expression is maintained for the better part of an hour, and it's within this region where Last Days is truly impressive.

An issue does arise with accessibility, which is a common point of conflict for releases that have trouble deciding if they are experimental or cinematic. Richardson is not committed to making a stance one way or another, and therefore forces the listener to do it themselves. As such, some tracks are bound to appear either decadent or impoverished, depending on what mindset the listener has chosen. Ideally, a middle ground should be reached by the listener where he can easily conform to the varying soundscape provided by Richardson, but there is a strong sense that his personal journey and the one which the listener traverses are not the same, which means an inherent disconnect is established from the very beginning. In any case, he's putting a lot of faith in his audience to not be complete dolts, and call me pessimistic if you will, but I just can't see many people really 'getting' the point he's trying to drive home here.

Undoubtedly, this is a minimal complaint; the album is nonetheless enjoyable, for the tracks do end up functioning well enough by their own, and any eventual motif resurrected from the audience just heightens the experience. I raise the issue because it's precisely what holds Richardson back enough to prevent this from being a really outstanding album. Certainly Richardson has done well to distance himself from landmark artists such as Stars of the Lid, Loscil, and Deaf Center, but this move towards abstraction does mean that he's now upstaged by much more proficient artists such as Richard Chartier, Taylor Deupree, Alvo Noto, and others. But, for a sophomore release, it's expected to see the artist still coming into his own sound and experimenting with possible new directions, inevitably creating a slightly disjointed work of art in the process. Regardless, Last Days is a quickly rising star who's likely delivered n5md's top album of the year and given himself plenty of room for future growth. This is an exciting time for Mr. Richardson.

-Lee Whitefield