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This
Invitation:
The Skin of Light
Though comprising only two full-time members, This Invitation manages to create a full, lush atmosphere with its music, much the way the beloved duo Spacemen 3 did. Using layers of guitar, bass, drums and organ with the occasional hushed vocals floating over top the band manufactures dreamy, druggy pop dirges perfect for late nights or long drives. A collection of just six songs, The Skin of Light is a full 50 minutes of music. The opening track, Scratching the Sunlight, clocks in at over ten minutes but hardly gets boring, as long as drone and sprawling buzziness are your kind of thing. The song is a veritable made-for-headphones symphony, chockfull of colorful textures. At moments, the instruments come together in such a way as to sound like chiming bells or even gentle jackhammers. Dissonant-yet-pretty lead guitar interjections give the song a definite Thurston Moore-wuz-here vibe, and its true that the song in general feels a lot like the mellower side of Sonic Youth, but still, This Invitation has an assured enough voice of its own to escape the been-there-done-that trap into which so many bands fall. Track two, Speaking with Stones, provides a nice contrast, going less for a head-in-the-clouds spacey-ness, and more for a down to earth, Im-only-daydreaming feel. Bringing to mind the gently detached mood of the third Velvet Underground album, with a touch of Bewitched-era Luna, the song is a tad shorter and more focused than its predecessor and segues smoothly into the similar sounding third track. All the Forgotten, however, puts a greater emphasis on vocals than weve heard up to this point. The two guys in the band share the vocal duties, singing all the lines together, but they are kept deliberately low in the mix and almost whisper their parts, ensuring that the words dont overshadow the sounds. Track four is probably the most conventional of the disc, at least in certain respects, and also the least successful, perhaps for the same reason. It is the most easily-identifiable song, with the vocals placed front-and-center in a way they never are elsewhere. And, at audible volumes, the shortcomings of the singers do not simply disappear into the background. Moreover, this is structurally the simplest of the tunes, basically just one refrain repeating over and over again, until, along with vocals, it finally becomes aggravating. Breezy in October, the penultimate number, is also lackluster, but The Fact of Our Dying closes out the release convincingly. If the horizon stretching out unendingly into the distance ahead of us could have its own soundtrack, this would be it: shimmering, woozy, a bit lost but determined to move forward. The beauty of confusion and desolation is captured with all its intensity and strangeness intact, once again proving that, at its best, This Invitation is capable of building a seamless sonic bridge between the real and the surreal.
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