Pitchfork

The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation. Though the implementation of unexpected song structures and ostensibly experimental sounds can make music quite a bit more interesting, it can also render it sterile, flat and emotionless. In many cases, the finest pop songs are those that transcend their form entirely-- songs so instinctually graceful that listening to them feels like a creative act in and of itself. Indeed, the best pop songs are often the most difficult to discuss rationally, those indispensable not for their formal inventiveness but for their ability to tap directly into the intangible realm of human memory and emotion.

In the mid-to-late 90s, Athens, Georgia's Elephant Six collective established themselves as a group of artists with a shared interest in expressing the inexpressible through pop music. The Olivia Tremor Control, fronted by singer/songwriters Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, encapsulated both the collective's unabashed love for both classic pop and psychedelic music, and its sincere interest in experimental music and sounds. This, the band's debut album, represents their most fundamental integration of these two impulses-- never does the record's sonic palette seem like an afterthought to the songs, nor do the songs themselves seem like haphazard carriers for carefully chosen sounds. For an album with so much going on, Dusk at Cubist Castle is strikingly holistic, its diverse elements held together by an uncanny awareness of what they can evoke and represent.

The Elephant Six Collective is known largely for their reverence towards classic pop music, and Dusk at Cubist Castle inevitably draws comparisons to The Beatles and Beach Boys. But the influence of these seminal pop groups seems to be evident in the Olivia Tremor Control's approach as much as their aesthetic. One imagines Hart and Doss not simply admiring Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, but utterly internalizing them-- appreciating them not only for specific melodies and sounds, but also for how affecting those melodies and sounds could be. Though the bouncy basslines and rich vocal harmonies of Dusk often bring to mind Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson, nothing sounds like the result of shallow imitation, as much as reverence and profound understanding.

Nowhere is this clearer than on Dusk's near-flawless first half. "Jumping Fences", one of the finest songs ever penned by Hart and Doss, conjures an air of introspective melancholy without ever approaching languor. At just under two minutes, "Jumping Fences" barely repeats itself at all, instead subtly building upon a beautiful, catchy melody with layered vocal harmonies, pianos and guitars. "No Growing (Exegesis)" follows a similar path, this time incorporating dramatic horn blasts into a climactic chorus.

The second half of Dusk at Cubist Castle is a decidedly more abstract affair, anchored by the 10-track "Green Typewriters" suite. It's here that the experimental undertones of Dusk at Cubist Castle begin to bleed through more noticeably. The fifth "Green Typewriters" track is a brief, unsettling, rhythmically insistent drone piece that foreshadows the extended ambience of "Green Typewriters" number eight. In part nine, the first discernible vocal melody for about ten minutes simply utters "how much longer can I wait," ushering in a majestic guitar solo that immediately plunges into a swirl of backwards sounds, whooshing cymbals and fuzzed-out chords. After the final installment of "Green Typewriters", Dusk at Cubist Castle returns to a slightly more stripped-down and fragmented variation on its first half, finally closing with the ghost-in-the-four-track noises of "NYC-25", one of their most affecting pop songs.

Aside from granting the album an air of timelessness, Dusk's saturated 4-track production always leaves me with the feeling that there's more to this album than can possibly be heard. And sure enough, eight years after its initial release, Dusk at Cubist Castle still somehow surprises me every time I listen to it. As its title suggests, there's something intensely cinematic about the record, and also something perpetually incomplete-- the images and ideas evoked stay with you much longer than the album itself. It's the masterful translation of these images and ideas that makes Dusk at Cubist Castle such a unique and unforgettable record.