If Chicago instrumental combo Russian Circles founded a school,
their curriculum would ditch the “three Rs”—who needs language
arts when your discipline forgoes words?—in favor of a trio of
Gs: geography, geometry, and geology. Studied closely, their music
revolves around exploring diverse terrain, measuring spatial relations,
and stratifying layers. And, yes, Russian Circles rock: at times, quite
hard.
On their second full-length, drummer Dave Turncrantz and guitarist
Mike Sullivan are joined by Brian Cook (Botch, These Arms Are Snakes)
on bass, with Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Minus the Bear) handling
production. Randomly sample a segment of any of the six tracks, and a
listener could be forgiven for thinking Station was the work
of myriad bands. But no, the skittish percussion fills, headbanging
bursts of staccato guitar shredding, unsettling dissonances, and
extended ambient passages were all crafted by the same players. (The
bowed bass and organ drones on “Versus,” however, come courtesy of Past
Lives’ Morgan Henderson and Bayles, respectively.)
What holds everything together, across 43 minutes that seem shorter,
is judicious overlapping pitched somewhere between tectonic plate
movement and a rapid-fire game of Tetris. Russian Circles
don’t deal in verses, choruses, and bridges in the traditional sense,
instead building songs around succinct melodic cells, elongated
textural passages, and mathematical counter-
point displays. On the
opening “Campaign,” repeated guitar figures ripple over sustained
notes, like an edgier update of Eno and Fripp’s seminal collaborations.
The core components of each track are sometimes embarrassingly
simple—during one chunk of “Station,” Cook plays the same bass
note past the point of mind-numbing and straight on till
mesmerizing—yet their array changes so quickly and fluidly that
boredom is never a concern; this is stoner music with ADD appeal.
Architect
Gymnast
Mariner
Bagman
