With its brown cardboard jacket, and liner notes printed on recycled office paper, Portland Oregon’s Carcrashlander wear its roots on its sleeves. The newest offering, Where to Swim, has a warm, earthy feel even before the first note
Carcrashlander is buoyed by its sheer range of styles and influences, and by meticulous attention to detail in the production. Cory Gray’s low, lazy vocal style is consistently supported by layers of perfect accompaniment; understated yet screechingly noisy guitars ("Landmines"), soulful Hammond-style keyboards ("House Arrest", "Boatful of Buckeye"), off-kilter horn sections ("Overgrown", "STS-925") to name just a few.
Where to Swim pays homage to a hundred different influences without ever sounding too much like any of them. There’s Beck’s more obscure early work, Lou Barlow’s home recordings, Badly Drawn Boy’s piano balladry, and even Pink Floyd and Neil Young lurking in the corners.
The album drips with horns and keyboards. The horn section sounds like a mad professor’s combination of your high school’s jazz band and a New Orleans funeral band; plodding arrangements where everyone seems to play a different key and tempo while somehow holding it together. The keyboards split the difference between retro-soul, a la Stevie Wonder, and space-aged bachelor-pad jazz; serving to warm the album and lift the down-tempo moments.
But where Carcrashlander soars is in its more experimental moments. Distorted vocals, droning bass and horns on "Overgrown" combine in a chanting meditation that sounds like a field recording of Inuit throat singing. The instrumental "STS-925" is a Dixieland jazz piece as re-imagined by Tim Burton. And finally, "Yellow Car Tides", sends listeners off, floating on a river of cough syrup and background noise; the perfect closer to a strange and wonderful album.
--George Dow [November 2, 2009]
