land is: Free Radio Werewolf | ★★★½ | Self-released | March 1
Irrepressible Triangle musician and writer Corbie Hill’s work with electronic music stretches too far back to call new release Free Radio Werewolf a foray. His methods for pushing through 2020 included pulling together a previous full-length collection of spirited experiments.
This latest album fully merges his personality with electronica. It never feels amateurish, but it does seem to revel in the joy of honing new skills. The album, an electronic travelogue of a family trip out to rural Texas and New Mexico in the winter of 2022, collides moods that are alternately pensive and ecstatic. Skittering beats and eager melodies jut into laconic drones, like parents shaking kids awake, or kids yelling to get their parents’ attention when they see something along the road.
It’s the personal feel that’s most impressive.
Indeed, while Hill listed off appropriate comparisons when he sent me the album—Boards of Canada, SUSS, Cowboy Sadness, Autechre, Tycho—I was left thinking more about the musician’s well-documented love for Star Trek.
There’s a giddy irreverence that calls to mind The Next Generation’s Ten Forward lounge acts in the way these compositions throw simple, familiar sounds and melodic structures into patterns and filters that are slightly askew. And there’s a unifying sense, in the alternating loneliness and camaraderie expressed by the album’s contrasting quietudes and cavalcades, that these sounds capture scenes experienced by a tight-knit crew on a long voyage.
Album opener “To Memphis” starts the journey with excitement, prancing and percolating like a Postal Service backing track, lo-fi electronics colliding with live drums and what sounds like a clarinet.
The vibe gets darker along the way. “Sideways Snow” plays like a deconstructed rap beat, with gun-click-esque sounds hyperventilating and giving way to arrhythmic bass hits and industrial scrapes and whirs. It sounds utterly exasperated with modern times. “Time Is Just Local Physics” finds a determined but low-key beat plowing forward below synthesizers that echo out dejection and resignation, like The National expressing their emotions entirely through music.
Connecting these extremes are songs that look out thoughtfully at the changing horizon. On “Red River Theme,” hand piano clicks through heavy reverb, with snippets of electronic melody, alternately concussive and sheeny, charting nebular clouds in the distance.
As with any long car trip, there are some off moments, contemplative tracks that are tedious, and moments when the energetic contrasts grate rather than excite.
But more often than not, this intimate collection makes one glad to have taken the ride.
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