Pitchfork

The artwork of Violets features scenes from a building in pleasant disrepair. Papers scattered and walls sea-green in morning light, it's the type of squat-able city residence you'd expect to find an art collective haunting. The photos serve Twine's inviting electronic scribbles well, but unlike some of their sound-art peers-- Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Gastr Del Sol-- whose work suggests entropy or decay, Twine's compositions sound like careful reconstructions of the decayed. A mix of twitching electronics, long, semi-coherent samples, and lapping melodic figures, Violets suggests painting a wall to peel or building stairs to creak.

Like a peek into the off-limits bedroom of a high school crush, much of Violets serves as fascinating melancholy. Snippets of voice, both sampled and recorded, float in and out of the album's chambers, vying for time with doped-down rhythm tracks and slo-mo guitar. On their fourth album and second for Ghostly International, Greg Malcolm and Chad Mossholder have mastered these atmosphere-heavy pills, to the point where "there's nothing new under the sun" would be apt criticism if any part of Violets-- save its cover art-- suggested the sun would come out tomorrow. The penultimate "Lightrain" uses a now-anachronistic answering machine, the device's junkyard destiny straining its recordings far more than the curtain of buzz and dewy piano they're forced to fight through. Two female guest vocalists-- Alison Shaw (of Cranes) and Gail Schadt-- offer mostly seamless cooing as a windy reprieve from Violets' claustrophobia.

But while Twine clearly seek to ply their doom with disconnected voices, their discordant, mordant guitar work is the battery that powers Violets. "Disconnected" is the simplest track here, but it offers a weird inversion of melody/rhythm relationship: a pendulous electric guitar-- one that wouldn't be out of place on one of fellow Ohioan Jason Molina's doom-folk records-- strains out chords in slow-clap time while a combustible beat sputters on like its drum machine blew a sparkplug. The title track places a preacher under trance-metal guitar while a xylophone-synth line offers the tiniest of sonic counterpoints. It is indicative of Violets' overarching mood that opener "Small" features a barely ascendant melody line that plays under a recording of heavy rain. Whatever its pieces, Twine's compositions rarely disguise their origins: instruments, voices, and electronics remain mostly separate. Violets can seem fatigued and depressed without reason or release, but its hardships are lessened because Twine always allow listeners insight into their structure.

"Longsided" condenses Twine's strengths and failings: the track begins with a rough male voice bitching about lodging over a phone. Over the next seven minutes the track ping-pongs between industrial noise, ominous drone, and glitchy beats. It's a fucking mess, and it highlights a sense of restlessness that runs through Violets: tracks like "Counting Off Again" and "Piano" from Twine's eponymous 2003 album found a hard-won compromise between familiar atmosphere and sonic ingenuity. Violets seems to abandon the latter half of that deal, sounding relatively conventional, or at least as conventional as a band can be inside the realm of sweaty, mush-brained sound dramas. At their best, Twine can sound like they're matting Silly Putty against the Books and then stretching and distorting the resultant print, using their beefy track lengths to elongate the silences between words and flirt with numbing repetition. Violets offers plenty more of these weirdly personal in-betweens, but they're starting to feel less weird.