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WINNER: MrDioji

Winning PICK: The Flashbulb's Arboreal

The Flashbulb’s “Undiscovered Colors” was the winner here.  Buuuut I got my hands on Arboreal, the album that opens with this track, and I don’t feel like I can do this music pick justice without talking about the album as a whole.

When you’re told that an electronic act is usually listened to more for albums than for tracks, you kinda get the idea that it might get the dreaded designation of music wallpaper.[1]  But . . . damn!  Arboreal is really different from anything else I’ve ever heard from an electronic album.  It’s almost a concept album--a term you don't exactly expect to use for this genre. 

The Flashbulb goes with short tracks here that seem to have an acute awareness of when everything that needed to be done with the track is done.  Of course the potential downside of having an LP full of 3-minute tracks is that the music has a shallow get-in, get-it-done, get-out type feel, but there’s such shape and variability to the album as a whole, that it doesn’t just feel like a stream of pop tracks.

The holistic feel to the album doesn’t just come from how well the tracks flow into each other, though that is an essential part of it.[2]  It’s that the album is almost broken up into three arcs with distinct beginnings, middles and ends.

The crescendo toward the first climax of the album begins with “We the Dispelled”--

Now, let me stop for a second to admit that I’ve been guilty of saying that electronic music can be anything it wants to be because it’s pretty much just defined as music that has some electronic instruments used.  But on some level I’ve known that this isn’t quite right—that you just don't find real electronica albums that have those essential rock n roll elements, for example. 

--So anyway, back to "We the Dispelled," the piece The Flashbulb wrote to prove that electronic can in fact be whatever it wants to be.  It opens with a drum intro that is so rockin', that it’s like it's straight out of “Been a Long Time Since I Rock and Rolled” (I use the long-hand title because it’s so fitting here).  Then, the tension builds as the electronic elements are introduced.  Chaos is headlined by the keyboard that sounds like an accented theremin that just doesn’t seem to give a **** what’s going on in the other layers of the song, rhythmically or tonally.

Then, “Raw Understanding” finishes off the climax of the first segment of the album.  This bitch is a really driving Drum and Bass, with the backing of a dread-wrought piano chord line that makes it sound like the recipe of a NIN song.  I’m serious about all this—go listen for yourself.

I could go on about each of the three segments that I've somewhat arbitrarily broken the album into--each with their own exposition, climax and resolution--but I think you’re starting to get the point.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that the final segment might be the most interesting.  It starts with “The Great Pumpkin Tapes.”  Remember when I said that I was lying when I said that electronica could be anything it wanted to?  Well, imagine how startled I was at hearing “The Great Pumpkin Tapes,” essentially a Phish instrumental, in the middle of this album.

The remainder of the album continues this very coherent, rock feel.  It even goes as far as to feature songs.  Inorite?  Most prominent in this regard is the second-to-last track, the longest piece on the album, and it's built around a 3-stanza vocal part, ending on a series of distorted guitar riffs.

Next thing you know, the album’s ending on Damien Rice-style acoustic+violins touchiness.  What in the bloody **** is going on here?!

It’s truly the most bananas album from any genre I’ve ever heard in terms of just piling on every genre, sound, influence they can pull off yet making it into something so cohesive that I’ve just said that it has the feel of a concept album.  I can't recommend this album enough and mad props to MrDioji for putting me on its scent. 

[1] Though I should point out that I think it’s silly how much crap the term "music wallpaper" gets, since I think that background-y music has its place.

[2] Now that I write this, I think that elecronica artists actually seem to less often have albums with seamless track listings than rock acts do, which seems insanely counterintuitive since these guys are the ultimate studio technicians.