(Too Pure)
Recording with Steve Albini as your producer is risky.
For every artist who benefits from the set-up microphones and get-out-of-the-way style that Albini champions, for every album whose beauty is brought out by the raw and personal sound he brings to the studio, there is another that just doesn't land up sounding as good as it could have. Albini produced The Pixies into an album musicians lined up at his studio to re-record. He produced an introspective Trent Reznor, and a brooding Nina Nastasia. But he also recorded into the ground, and came out with a cut of so guttural that someone, debatably the label, sent it to a second producer to be remixed.
And now, it is Electrelane's turn in Albini's studio. The band, four British girls prone to ditching their own lyrics for famous people's sonnets, has gone three years without an album. 2001's organ dense earned them a legion of fans around their spontaneous Mogwai-via-Sonic-Youth alternative sound but failing to connect with critics as an album from a band who had fully matured. suffered the problem of too much creativity- the mostly instrumental tracks would stem into far too lengthy songs, filled with good thoughts that were hinted at but never fully explored.
What went wrong on went right on . Either by will of Albini or of the group themselves Electrolane's over-exuberance has given way to a focused band, more intimate and pleasantly muted, growing into an experimental Brit-pop band more interested in building sound through deliberate, rhythmic guitar, bass and drum layers. Albini has captured a band with a growing sense of inflection, a healthy distance from the verse-chorus-verse music, and an intelligence and experimentation just this side of pretentious. \The Valleys,"" which implements an organ and acoustic drum kit to decorate a 12-man choir, is among the lushest songs to come out of Britain this year.
But in muting the band, in calming them down, Albini's producing-by-not-producing style seems to allow a few of the most interesting moments to be drowned out by the rest of the song. Important guitar riffs get lost in the static, the pulsing based gets drowned in the guitar.
Electrelane will have a classic album within the next two or three outings. The songs and the style are almost there on There is brilliance on, a brilliance that needed Steve Albini to bring it out of Electrelane, but he seems to lose a lot of it in this mix.
