Pitchfork

Mark Richardson, in a rare show of hand, once admitted in a review that he had a crippling soft spot for this specific shimmery wet electric sound, as championed by everyone from Jesus and Mary Chain and MBV to Fennesz and Tim Hecker to Wolfgang Voigt and Radian to Yume Bitsu and Polmo Polpo. I'm prone to the same critical shortcircuiting; if you make a record with that sound, I will probably like it; if you do it well, I will abuse it.

Recorded in pre-ravaged New Orleans, this processed guitar noise record might get tagged "Disintegration Loops for Hurricane Katrina." But the album is much more nuanced emotionally, less conceptual, better edited, and songy in the way Black Dice or Isolée can be songy. Some tracks, like "Remove the Inside", sound like Belong may have written them out on staff: simple melodies stretched out so we feel the jumps in tone from note to note, and hear the color changes as those perfect pitch adverts tell us.

Glee Club kids, there's a song here called "Who Told You This Room Exists" that sounds like Josquin's "Tu solus" slowed down, burnt vinyl caught on the lock track, the guitars swelling like bass men right before the progression resolves and breathes in again. The nylon is more audible on "I'm Too Sleepy...Shall We Swim", guitar strums blowing over crackly, pitch-black silence like fingers brushing skin-- nerve-wracking, romantic, intense, and hardly there at all.

Of course, the second I mention the title track's slide guitar siren or the breathy static, how it drapes waves of rolling white noise that inch closer and closer until it swallows us loud and whole... I mean if October Language isn't about Katrina, it's at least about hardship, big or small or personal, and music's curious power to help us deal.

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