New !!! album relies on rhythm
Published March 9, 2007
MADRID, Spain — It's music that can be enjoyed any number of ways. It's bobbing heads on the dance floor, tripping hands that reach for nothing and decipherers of music who pick it apart piece by piece to find the gooey nougat center to explain the whole.
The diverse elements of sound blend well on Myth Takes, !!! (pronounced chk chk chk)'s newest album, and offer up an infinite amount of interpretations and prospects for delight. And though it remains a sporadic and hyper aural manifestation of ADD, it comes together as one progression in the pursuit of the psychedelic and the dance floor.
Because of its rather eclectic and dynamic nature, the best way to understand the musical development of Myth Takes would be to envision it as a dance party (no doubt the ideal place to play this album).
Everyone shows up at once, excited and muscles-spastic in the anticipation of dancing. The album vaults into action with "Myth Takes," driving with Nic Offer's vocals, the pulsing drum set and an effervescent squealing that soars. It maintains an overall rigid structure until roughly halfway through the album when we hear "Heart of Hearts," which begins a gradual and uneven descent into the obscure.
The party moves beyond physical presence into a state of musical and aural euphoria, and it becomes its own entity. The album becomes fluid and free moving, the music begins to breakdown foundations of structure and repetition that had chained it in the beginning, and it assumes a consciousness of its own.
The themes of parallelism and repetition keep the album strong and pulsating. Ideas find themselves repeated throughout songs, sometimes broken apart and reassembled. There are even times when they cross the restrictions of track definitions, jump borders and escape to hear themselves just one more time.
"A New Name," the fifth track on the album (and one of those that possesses a defined structure), begins with a brief punctuated mallet line, soft in volume, complimented by a growing percussion element that eventually leads into vocals and the bulk of the track.
On the other side of the spectrum is "Break in Case of Anything" that sides with mutability of sound and experimentation and is essentially the best track on the album — though there are several worthy contenders. It's a beauty and the epitome of the final part of the album, disregarding the form of the previous half, dipping into the psychedelic, playing with synthetic and percussive sounds and mixed with horns and voices.
In "Must Be the Moon," Nic Offer's words of lust and alcohol go flying with a blend of '70s disco and hip-hop, all the while sidling among contrasts of high and low pitched vocals. Although the track gradually dives into a droning of earlier themes, the underlying snare beats easily maintain the movement of the listener's head but grant rest enough to allow respite from heart attacks and angina.
Also, it should be mentioned that the melodic line of is unmistakably similar to that of "Name," another display of the repetition of ideas.
Although the album as a whole relies on rhythmic and synthetic elements, Offer's vibrant rhyming voice and the piano lines that often accompany it give the album a very dark and enigmatic feel. But when he drops into the lower registers, there is a loss of energy and it takes the listener out of the music, only to be dragged — blistering and pleading for more — back into the bends and pulls and beatings of the rhythm.
Myth Takes can be enjoyed any number of ways but trying to understand the sheer complexity of it will probably cause aneurisms. So your best bet is probably to relax and let it carry you on the dance floor. It's only natural.