Aiming to provide "a depressive but hopeful space for people", Chicago trio Speck Mountain ,s debut album Summer Above is a woozy combination of melodiousness and unearthliness, of accessible pop and trippy psychedelic. Karl Briedrick and Marie-Claire Balabanian spent two years of midnight studio time painstakingly overdubbing layers of guitar and bass using analogue tapes with Kate Walsh's sax and keyboards added later. The album is wash with reverb end echo suffusing the sustained, interweaving tones and melodies with an wraithlike delicacy. The voice of Marie-Clare Balabanian is more earthbound , her crisply enunciated slightly sultry tones grounding the songs and preventing them from floating away in a hazy gaseous cloud of billowing reverberations.
Comparisons can be made to Mazzy Star, Beach House, Low, Camera Obscura while the vocals recall Cat Power and Feist . Songs vary from the just over two minutes relative jaunt of "Stockholm " to two eight minute plus tracks -the clanging chords and interweaving organ of "Chlorine Pools" and the rather more diffuse bass notes and flickering filtered strains of "Girl Out West" which to be honest does outstay its welcome.
The main criticism that could be levelled at Summer Above is the tangible lack of variety in the songs. They are all mono-paced with nebulous keyboards, meticulously descending and repetitive guitar arrangements and osculated polite percussion. It's all very tasteful and some will hate this album for that very reason but immerse yourself in the music's tonal shifts and gradiated luxury and it becomes beautifully hypnotic. Songs like "Midnight Sun" , "Hey Moon" and the title track are mesmerising and the extra track for the UK release "Blood Is Clean" actually revels in a clinically catchy guitar riff.
Speck Mountain also offer in the brass bursts in Hey Moon" , the unearthly whistling on "Stockholm " and the coarser edges of the extra track glimpses that there is more to them than disseminated timbre and eddying organs. What's here is mostly terrific if you are prepared to surrender to it's pop filtered through the language of the subconscious, but there are signs that this band are capable of making music that stretches way beyond that . Their next album, already recorded I believe, should be fascinating .
