An album of guitar-based instrumentals can be a pretty scary thing. At best you'll get third-string Tortoise knock-offs or impenetrable self-indulgent art-wank noodling; at worst, you'll get a guy who thinks he's the next Joe Satriani -- as if we needed another -- but lacks the requisite skill and restraint to make his compositions rise above the level of cruel and unusual punishment.
Luckily, once in every thousand (or so) crap-intensive guitar albums there comes a Roy Montgomery record. Montgomery, you see, is sort of the MacGyver of guitars. He can take an extremely modest melody -- say, a humble two-chord alternation -- and turn it into something special and beautiful. In his hands, guitars emit gorgeous, shimmering threads of ethereally brittle noise. And he does it on a four track, using only a couple of guitars, and e-bow and some modest keyboards and effects units. When you look at the quality of his music relative to the extremely modest means by which it is produced, Montgomery comes across like a sort of Amish equivalent to My Bloody Valentine.
While The Allegory of Hearing consists primarily of short instrumentals, its centerpiece is a seventeen-minute epic. The "Resolution Island Suite" (named for a small island off the New Zealand coast that played host to an early -- and ultimately unsuccessful -- animal sanctuary) consists of seven thematically-linked movements. If you caught Montgomery's performance at Terrastock II in 1998, you heard a fledgling version of this piece, though the album version is the definitive work. It seems as if the whole "long composition made up of multiple shorter sequences" concept is in the midst of a renaissance among the art-rock crowd; Godspeed You Black Emperor, who use it as a way to keep all their clever song titles from going to waste, are a prime example. Montgomery's piece, not surprisingly, is a more mannered affair, favoring extended droning meditations and gradual, drawn-out mini-climaxes over colossal, swelling musical events. The piece accelerates to a comparatively feverish pace, but retains the laconic sprawl of Montgomery's trademark strum.
While the "Resolution Island Suite" provides The Allegory of Hearing with an obvious peak, the shorter works are equally worthy of your attention. "Rock, Sea, Muse, Seek" (yes, someone other than Theodore can use the word "muse") supports the "Amish MBV" assertion, placing Montgomery's shimmering strum front and center and supporting it with a keening, swooning ebow drone. "Sounding the Abyss" lives up to its name, plumbing tonal depths with guitar and ebow -- listen with headphones or a subwoofer! "From the Promontory" paints a broad landscape of lush, multi-layered guitar splendor, rather like the musical equivalent of a beautiful multicolored sunrise. And for those of you fond of harder edges, "At the Intersection of Herzog & Wenders" layers fuzz on those chiming guitars, resulting in superlative dischord that's eventually spiked by a jaunty keyboard melody.
In other words, The Allegory of Hearing is another elusive-yet-stunning effort from Roy Montgomery. If you haven't heard him before, you owe it to yourself to discover him as soon as possible.
