Pitchfork

Nominally it's a B-side to "Hendrix with Ko" from the feted Up in Flames, but the sound of "Silver Splinters" falls pretty squarely between the pastoral-IDM approach of Manitoba's 2002 full-length Start Breaking My Heart and last year's stuffed-sound psychedelic behemoth. Wasting no time, the song busts out of 7L with a spacious, polydistorted big beat which provides the composition's entire framework. The song grows grandiose not from simple cosmetic additions and subtractions, but because Snaith forcefeeds it from within, stuffing a smorgasboard of verdant soft-bells-and-string textures, turntable vocal scratch-ups, and a painfully lonesome trumpet flipping its octave and all the notes between. All of this, however, is a distraction for Snaith's larger motives with this song: as "Silver Splinters" progresses, it becomes increasingly darker, and by its end, it shares a strain of melancholy with Clint Mansell. It's this profound darkness that more than likely excluded the track from the otherwise upbeat Up in Flames, rather than a lack of careful composition or Humanus. "