Hy-Brasil - Lights Out Asia

Hy-Brasil

Lights Out Asia

n5MD Records.

SCQ Rating: 65%

I traveled once to Banff, Alberta, and was lucky enough to drive through the Rocky Mountains. Their foggy snowcaps and rocky ledges aping upward were stupefying to stand witness to. But after hours winding around their beauty, it all began to lose scale; only so many successive highs and sprawling vistas can motivate someone before the stimulation turns over, in effect draining the sightseer until they’re transient gazers merely taking photographs to appreciate later. Similarly Lights Out Asia only know how to make epic records and eventually that poses a problem. Listeners can appreciate the band’s vision, to create shimmering aural worlds to wander through, but with each likeminded marathon, the scale wobbles; big downgrades to average, explosive crescendos become expected and the whole weight of the project turns tedious.

Lights Out Asia (now the duo of Mike Ystad and Chris Schafer, since guitarist Mike Rush departed) have taken to the boundaries of their collective imagination to find ways of contextualizing this scale; 2010’s In the Days Of Jupiter went into the far reaches of space and this 2012 effort occupies a mysterious, almost-definitely fictitious island. An inventive association with terrain makes sense for a band so adept at creating atmosphere but it can’t ground Hy-Brasil’s seventy-minute runtime when it’s sonically still up in space. This new odyssey sounds exactly like In the Days Of Jupiter – and, in no small way, like earlier albums – as if Lights Out Asia haven’t traded in so much as a pedal or guitar-effect since they signed to n5MD five years ago. Right out of the gate, that stagnancy kills any conceptual elements Hy-Brasil had considered playing with.

Geographical indifference aside, a track like “Running Naked Through Underground Cities” reveals that the n5MD mainstays still have ample fuel in the tank with a richly hypnotic, four-by-four bass line pushing a smeared synth track of Schafer’s remotely romantic, multi-tracked vocals. Concise but yearning, it sits near the crest of the band’s high watermark, 2007’s Tanks and Recognizers. Unlike that record, however, where two alien languages – post-rock and electronica – assembled into something at once cohesive and earthshakingly combative, Hy-Brasil’s merger feels rooted in habit, not catharsis, and nullifies both the ferocious and atmospheric halves of the Lights Out Asia brand. As a result, supposedly emotional slow-burners like “An Imperfect System” and “They Disappear Into the Palms” drift redundantly by.

It pains me to see Lights Out Asia let their trademark sound and ambition drain into the same bloated framework, where more upsurges and climaxes mean increasingly less and less. At this stage the best thing Lights Out Asia can do is record a four-song EP using only acoustic instruments and analog electronics. Sure it would mean retooling the whole process and educating themselves on some new hardware, but the results would accomplish more than this reverse shock-and-awe. They’d be establishing fresh contrast to a discography that, after Hy-Brasil, sorely needs a change in direction.

In the Days Of Jupiter - Lights Out Asia

In the Days Of Jupiter

Lights Out Asia
n5MD Records.

SCQ Rating: 84%

It was in the bleakest week of winter - end of January, beginning of February – when I first heard Lights Out Asia at a friend’s apartment in Montreal. Through a sampling of what my friend judged as key tracks, maybe three in all, I knew this was neither another post-rock band dabbling in electronics nor anything I could readily compare against. Truly, Tanks and Recognizers delivered that something I’d been missing in my record collection, and nothing’s likely to steal its thunder, now or ever.

What makes Tanks and Recognizers so untouchable isn’t that the 2007 outing’s dynamics can’t be cloned or recycled, but that Lights Out Asia don’t even attempt a victory lap. In the Days Of Jupiter zip-lines out to where Eyes Like Brontide wandered two years ago, then skips a few galaxies for some unspoiled pastures, both alien and ambient. Carried weightless into this unfurling distance by ‘All These Worlds Are Yours’ and encountering first-turmoil on ‘Except Europa’, we listeners have no safety chute to steer free with, no rational opening to abuse the skip-button. Best heard as a whole, In the Days Of Jupiter paces its interplanetary tour with extended bouts of cool electronics and sudden collisions of ferocity, typically trading serene nuances (‘All Is Quiet In the Valley’) for blistering guitar assaults (’13 AM’). Although many of these tracks exude spaciousness and foreboding – like ‘Attempt No Landing Here’, which creeps from a supple chill-out track into a Godspeed! You Black Emperor build – but the explosive electronic-rock marriage evident on Tanks and Recognizers is largely gone. Here, the spectrum gets wider, the poles more extreme, and the journey more intense.

As with any dramatic shift, some fans will cry foul, citing their heavy crescendos and Chris Schafer’s vocals as too absent, too often. Those are fair criticisms for a first-listen scenario – hell, they were mine – but for all of Lights Out Asia’s attention to atmosphere, none of it falters into negative space or, worse, tedium. Alternately, the album’s back-end gets surprisingly antsy, retracing wall-to-wall dance production in ‘Then I Hope You Like the Desert’ and epic rise-then-crumble dynamics on ‘Shifting Sands Wreck Ships’. Like its limitless cover-art, In the Days Of Jupiter keeps blurring the horizon, camouflaging as a meditative affair when emotion is raging just beneath the clouds. There’s no going back, and fortunately, Lights Out Asia knew this before I did.

46. Tanks and Recognizers - Lights Out Asia (2007)

My friend and I have a running joke: like clockwork, Lights Out Asia show up at a random Milwaukee high school to compete in its annual battle-of-the-bands competition. They unload all of their extensive gear, play a show so immense and spectacular that the audiences’ spines go straight, the auditorium’s house-speakers blow, and Lights Out Asia are awarded second place. Sure, part of the joke is in reference to Milwaukee’s questionable music scene but mostly the joke is our way of expressing confusion that Lights Out Asia aren’t selling out shows in Paris, Tokyo and Germany. What’s that they say about a joke you have to explain…?

Tanks and Recognizers should’ve catapulted this Milwaukee trio toward the post-rock echelon with unforgettable epics like ‘Roy’, ‘March Against the Savages’ and ‘Four Square’ but word never traveled. Here’s hoping the band’s upcoming 2010 effort earns them the attention long-since due.