High Places VS Mankind - High Places (No Ripcord Review)

High Places VS Mankind

High Places
Thrill Jockey Records.

No Ripcord Rating: 7/10
SCQ Rating: 67%

Reviewing High Places’ full-length debut with any clairvoyance seemed impossible without accepting a series of inevitable paradoxes, that: (A) its craft would be commended, if not always enjoyed, (B) each song worth complimenting would be negated by a disappointing nemesis-track, and (C) ultimately High Places has to choose you… you can’t play-repeat your way over its hurdles. If there was any consolation to that 2008 review, it was the grim acknowledgement that I wasn’t alone in my indifference. Fan reception offered no easy consensus, with half the camp professing their preference for the singles collection 03/07-09/07, while the self-titled LP’s score on Metacritic showcased a careful tedium that, in most cases, shrugged that High Places deserved the benefit of the doubt.

That doubt, as I pinpointed throughout my lengthy judgment-call with High Places, boiled down to a disconnect; that for all their promising rhythms and clattering collages, the duo of Rob Barber and Mary Pearson couldn’t commit to a hook long enough to imbed emotion into what were otherwise charmingly hopeless curios. High Places VS Mankind, while likely not titled as a rebuke toward their divided fanbase, again faces the task of assembling a full-length capable of matching the high watermark set by their too-good-too-soon singles compilation.

No differently than how 03/07-09/07 supplanted some of the self-titled record’s status, how this proper sophomore settles with you will depend on what you liked about High Places in the first place. If you favoured the structured focus of songs like 'Namer' and 'Gold Coin' that tied their recess-singalongs to fractured pop hooks, High Places VS Mankind offers your kind of progression. And mine, too. Blazing through the opening gates with 'The Longest Shadow' and 'On Giving Up', High Places take their school bus of bizarre electronics clubbing, locking Pearson’s flighty vocals into deep-set grooves of live bass and guitar. When the duo isn’t streamlining its auxiliary percussion into New Wave-inspired heartbeats, they’re treading dangerously close to forming a fluent album with 'The Channon' and 'Canada'; the former a cloud of dense loops and harmonic experimenting, the latter track delivering a speaker-blown melancholy, crawling across gray horizons, post-everything.

When you consider that Barber and Pearson labeled their self-titled record’s genre as “Children’s Songs” on iTunes, the steps taken on High Places VS Mankind can’t help but feel like a graduation of sorts. Recalling only bits of their awkward past-flirtations with electro-pop, this new material feels ripe with a formative momentum that only occasionally misses the mark (the elementary musings behind 'On a Hill in a Bed on a Road in a House', we can do without). This follow-up isn’t quite as quirky, sure, and the same fan-divisions will argue whether the band has strayed toward commercial outlets. To a degree, they have, although not at the cost of their best assets. Unlike previous efforts, High Places are committing themselves to a scene, trendy as it may be, and writing songs that equate to more than electronic whirls and bangs.

(This review was originally published on No Ripcord...)

High Places - High Places

High Places

High Places
Thrill Jockey Records.

SCQ Rating: 67%

Sometimes reviews come easy; you hear it four times over a weekend and have your entire case mentally mapped out. More often you elbow yourself into it, critically eyeing all corners and, like you would a house, ensuring it stands solid. And then there are times you spend a month and a half struggling to earn whatever discipline you’re lacking in order to comprehend it, and if you’re lucky, your efforts make the record in question all the better. In the case of High Places, my efforts have taught me this: some records will keep you at distance, regardless of your intentions. Sometimes there’s just a disconnect.

I feel like a failure to therefore state that the whole affair, which barely clocks in at half an hour, feels inconsequential, like a talented student unable to find their calling. Since High Places’ identity is so wrapped up in their use of percussion - a meticulously cluttered assortment of kitchen-ware clapping - it distracts these songs from achieving any transcendence; too slow to dance to, too intangible to chill out to. This attention to rhythmic detail also derails any permanent sense of melody, as a ton of cool effects and keys filter in then out of the mix, leaving us with promising whispers of could’ve-beens. These brief teases are most indicative in segues like ‘Papaya Year’ and ‘You in Forty Years’, which lay down awesome beds of melody which are abandoned instead of built upon. Most unnerving is their technique of latching any melodic accountability to Mary Pearson’s vocals, which are coyly unconscious, as if someone recorded her while she dusted the bedroom unaware. Sometimes they work, like in the fully-developed ‘Namer’ or the vocal-hook of ‘A Field Guide’, but often times Pearson sounds uninterested, leaving us with halfhearted tunelessness like in the otherwise-cool, Kahlil Gibran-esque ‘Gold Coin’. Likewise, much of High Places feels like it’s afraid of committing to a sound.

Having that last paragraph penned, I now suspect my disappointment is half imaginary; it’s true, I expected High Places to champion itself a more emotive, Four Tet-leaning outfit. After all, I was listening to ‘From Stardust to Sentience’, a mind-blowing fusion of ambience and punchy beat-patterns. Even now, a month and a half later, I can appreciate High Places as an accumulative record where from ‘The Storm’ onward, it grows into its fragile frame like some undisturbed wildflower. It might only fully flourish by its final track but in no way is that a poor reflection on the rest of the album. Slight disappointment aside, this remains the most provocative debut album Thrill Jockey has released in years, one equal parts lovely and jarring, that challenges the virtue of patience.