Every Record I Own - Day 660: Brian Case Parallel Voices
This is an album highlight of 2020.
There’s been a certain consistency across Brian Case’s various bands. 90 Day Men tapped into a post-punk sound that regulated the guitar to a stabby, dissonant, textural component. Disappears scaled the guitars back even further, testing the limits of how austere a song could be while still feeling like a proper song. With his latest band FACS, Case leans into both the anti-riff aspect of 90 Day Men and the reductionist principle of Disappears, manipulating the guitar into some alien-sounding instrument that creates a backdrop of unease that allows the rhythm section to provide the primary musical information. So how does this approach work when Case opts to make an entire album of guitar instrumentals?
It winds up it’s pretty damn compelling. Parallel Voices has a bit of an ASMR quality about it---we’re listening to Case’s unorthodox guitar playing under a microscope. But fortunately, Case does such a fascinating job of obscuring his methodology that the sound sources on Parallel Voices sound like they could be any number of instruments other than guitar. The album’s five songs all sound like hazy transmissions from some distant location, and the various pulses and swells and percolations of sound that make up the compositions seem somehow completely random and accidental, yet tonally and harmonically compatible. There’s an element of chaos in the disregard for structure and rhythm, but there’s also a master’s touch at wrangling these haphazard sounds into something that still holds considerable melodic weight.
If you’re in the mood for sublime droning instrumentals but still want something with an edge of tension and potential unravelling to it, I highly recommend Parallel Voices.
