Pitchfork

Chicago's the Race split up in 2004, the result of the buzz-killing intrusions that have prematurely ceased so many other young bands: personality conflicts and a lack of money. Singer and songwriter Craig Klein took that misfortune as an opportunity to redouble his songwriting efforts, however, augmenting them with the sort of historical research made possible by his day job at the Chicago Public Library. A couple of years later, he emerges with Ice Station, a concept album about an imagined trip from Siberia to China and back again.

Like any travelogue worth undertaking, Ice Station concerns itself not as much with the destination as the process of reaching it, and each song is a keenly crafted and ingratiating set piece documenting an imagined journey. Much of the record's crystalline desolation is no doubt due to Klein's collaborator Joshua Eustis, previously known for his sharp, electronic dissonance with Telefon Tel Aviv. Here, the guitars purr robotically, the drums are as flat and unforgiving as the white tundra, and Klein's voice resonates like a warm radio signal. Echoes of dark, pliable post-punk bass appear frequently, as does the lonesome electro-gloom of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and the understated eccentricity of early Pinback, but Klein's work here is set apart by its clean, simple approach to moody expressionism.

The record abounds with the sort of spaciousness and clarity that come from an all-too-rare effective translation of environment to music, and its vague narrative of adventure and romance is impressively heightened with a keen ear toward the forcefulness of big, dramatic moments. "The Shortest Way to China" opens with a guitar tightly wound into a thin screech, before giving way to a towering chorus. "Ice Station" complements its bassline, which rumbles like an icebreaker engine, with clipped puffs of breath and the spectral repetition of "Ulan Bator", the Mongolian capital that doubles as a steady vamp. "Odessa" is a cantering road fable about a journey to the titular city, and Klein's weary, melismatic vocals on "A Kind of Solution" feel like an exhausted plea to a long-lost lover.

Throughout Ice Station, the sense of cinema is palpable; Klein and Eustis' music seems designed to aurally evoke elements David Lean's panaoramic stoicism, the glimmering dystopia of Blade Runner, and Robert Flaherty's lonesome minutae. If the record has a fault, it's that its last quarter relaxes a bit too much, gliding to a gradual conclusion instead of going out with a bang. But it's a minor quibble-its best quality is Klein's ability to make restraint sound fresh and vibrant, and it offers evidence that his own isolation, digging through stacks of dusty reference books, helped immeasurably to create Ice Station's ingratiating sense of frozen solitude.