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A Northern
Chorus: Bitter Hands Resign
It doesnt surprise me one bit that the previous album from A Northern Chorus achieved a 21 ranking on CMJs college radio core chart awhile back. Listening to this new release, Bitter Hands Resign, is immediately rewarding, as the music throws you into a dreamy atmosphere of warm fuzzy guitars and acoustic cello. The lethargic vocals fit the mood perfectly, and the voice on tracks like Prisoners of Circumstances gives a nice smooth sound to connect to as the bass throbs slowly in the background. Most striking about the band is probably its ability to drift effortlessly between gentle and heavy soundscapes. From quiet interludes to crescendos, every song keeps rolling forward into new territory, and only when some of the songs end do you realize many are over seven minutes long. Actually, the sequencing of the album is so good that many tracks are mixed directly into one another, making the entire LP more like one long forty-nine minute song. I hate throwing a band reference at an album this accomplished, but it should be stated how much this band would appeal to fans of Slowdive. A Northern Chorus manages to evoke a sound very similar to the long defunct Reading quintet, but the instruments they use to create the soundscapes are very different. Cellist and second vocalist Alex McMaster adds a few female vocals to flush out the songs in a Slowdive fashion, but there is far less guitar droning in tracks by A Northern Chorus. I suppose most songs are more acoustic in composition, and I guess it is this strong interplay of cello, organ, bass, and guitars that so effectively replaces Slowdives signature drone. Perhaps it is worth mentioning some of the particular advantages the bands musical style affords them. When structuring an album of drifting atmospheres, you can instantly throw out many rock n roll clichs that quite frankly get a bit old after awhile like forcing your lyrics to rhyme, for example. Its completely unnecessary for the vocals to have any such structure in the framework of the music here, and it frees the lyricist to describe some quite mysterious images in an unstructured prose format. Still, the lead male vocals here are the complete antithesis of, say, spoken word; because every word is sung gently around the music, elevating the words far from the prose in the lyric sheet. This is an album that is completely worth buying if youre into this artistic style. A Northern Chorus is as competent at what it does as any band I could possibly compare them with, and Bitter Hands Resign serves as a fabulous introduction.
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