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When I was seventeen years old, the centre of my musical universe was
Codeine. I'd never heard anything like The White Birch before, and
once I had, my tastes in music were changed forever. As strong as that
album was (and continues to be), it was only after I had the opportunity to
see the band play live that I realized how powerfully unique their sound
really was. Several years later, it was Red House Painters that took over
that position at the centre of my universe, and Mark Kozelek's plain-spoken,
heart-wrenching poetry stood as an example of how tragically perfect things
could really be.
In September of 1998, Perth, Australia's Bluetile Lounge quietly released their sophomore album, Half Cut, on Steve (Sonic Youth) Shelley's Smells Like Records, and with it they reserved their place in the canon of darkly romantic, glacially-paced classics. It was an album that collapsed the numerous differences between Codeine and Red House Painters, refined the emotional core into a bright and brilliant star, and shuffled the sounds into a quiet corner to brood and mature. You could criticize such an effort as derivative -- but why not, instead, lay back and enjoy the stunning conflation of the most stirring sounds of the last two decades of downtempo indie rock?
Bluetile Lounge were clearly fascinated with the sounds of the
early-nineties shoegazer movement, and just as interested in and informed by
the dark chamber sounds of the 4AD roster. But in the end, Half Cut's sound is closer to a barbiturate-soaked torch song aesthetic than
any dream pop or ambient rock school. Exploring the role of dynamics in a
manner that runs parallel to Codeine's explosive sound, Bluetile Lounge
crafted epic ballads that swam in a sea of melancholic themes, though they
were tinged with hopefulness. Only three of the nine tracks on Half
Cut clock in at under seven minutes. The rest of the songs take ages to
develop, longer to reveal themselves and a lifetime to burn out.
Album opener "Liner" announces the band with a wildly dramatic gesture.
Drums wrapped in reverb prove strong enough to break to pieces a cagey old
guitar, beaten to a pulp by a timid figure. With every note they
played, Bluetile Lounge studiously expressed the broadest range of emotions
communicable by a couple of slope-shouldered guitarists, a drummer who
basked in restraint and the simple beauty of a woman seated behind a piano.
"Steeped" is Half Cut's defining moment (and for my money, one of the
most beautiful songs ever written). Its downtempo time signature, lazily
brushed drum pattern and meandering slide guitar prop up Howard Healy's
sorrowful vocal melody (the album's best example of the singer's kinship
with Kozelek). On the first beat of every bar, the entire arrangement
intersects only briefly before lurching towards a translucent dissonance,
neatly recollected by a gentle piano figure that returns us to the song's
dominant melodic theme. At fleeting moments within the mix, Healy's voice
is accompanied by multi-tracked harmonies, the melody carried by angels into
a falsetto range that drips with sadness and perfectly expresses the sense
of loss that permeates the ballad. Alternately, the coda of "Lapsis" -- an
instrumental passage featuring guitar harmonics that ring like a
glockenspiel -- shows off Gabrielle Cotton's gorgeous voice as it hovers in
the mix like a heaven-sent harmony. Every track, in every note, swims with
these moments that refuse to be ignored and resonate so intensely.
Sadly,
the band remained active only briefly after the album's release, but I'm
told indie punters in Perth still talk about Bluetile Lounge gigs with a
sort of reverence, and local retailers were shocked to see Half Cut
sell 1300 copies in its first month of release.
Sitting today in my unbearably hot and humid bedsit in downtown Montreal,
I'm just as bowled over by Half Cut as I was stung
by its beauty five years ago, shivering in my horribly drafty basement pad
during a windy winter in Toronto. The sounds seem to have matured just as I
have, and my experiences in life and love continue to find their reflection
in the sounds of Bluetile Lounge. Half Cut defines
not only the period of my life within which it first appeared, but all that
has followed it, shaping and informing my experiences with its blue notes,
minor chords and the dissonant poetry of love, loss and longing. I'll argue
to the very end that it is not just one of the most perfectly realized
albums of the 1990s, but a treasure to be coveted by listeners, no matter
when they are fortunate enough to stumble upon it.
-- Mike Baker
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