A Lily - Wake:Sleep
Rating
RIYL
Stafrænn HákonManual
Byla
Efterklang
World's End Girlfriend
Tracklist
01 - i am to you02 - lights shone brighter. my delicate sun is my sparklin' sun
03 - leanna is a quiet meow
04 - you are the sun, your eyes are the sun
05 - aerials quiet and death-defying
06 - the sleepers
07 - arms around sleep
08 - shipwreck
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The biggest mistake on A Lily's debut album is one that the listener will make. It is this: expecting to hear music at all related to James Vella's band Yndi Halda. As side/solo projects often go, artists use the outlet to express themselves in ways which their main musical focus does not, as well as experimenting in sounds that would not mesh well with the rest of the bandmates. Indeed, Yndi Halda's Enjoy Eternal Bliss is an organic slice of the post-rock world, in many ways surpassing the band's great ambition in sheer talent and musical knowledge. James Vella, being the curious musician that he is, sought to expand his musical boundaries by dipping into the electronic world for a bit. The result was two projects - A Lily and Into the Heavens, Into the Clouds - which come together in some creative exposition to make Wake:Sleep. But, have no reservations about it, Yndi Halda is the furthest thing on Vella's mind when he enters the world of A Lily
On the surface Wake:Sleep is a bit disjointed. I'm tempted to say it's schizophrenic, but that's not really the correct word to describe the experience of the album. It is disjointed; the first six tracks are a stark difference from the last two. On my first or second listen through the album, I was really shocked by two things. The first of which is the aforementioned lack of resemblance to Yndi Halda, and the second was the transition of the album between track six and seven. It would be quite foolish of me to prematurely write this off as an "error" in the composition of the album (“perhaps a hasty/lazy decision by Vella to combine projects for his first effort”), as undoubtedly such accusations normally reflect the critics inability to see eye to eye with the artist's vision and not a shortcoming on the artist himself. So, I found myself going back to the drawing board on this time and again, trying to unlock the puzzle of Wake:Sleep.
Luckily for me I received a digital copy of Wake:Sleep right around finals time when I didn't have excessive amounts of free time to listen to music. One evening I plugged myself into my trusty mp3 player with Wake:Sleep in toe and suddenly it all became clear. Wake...Sleep - it's a "sleep" album. Oh, how the realization hit me like a ton of bricks, as there are cues literally everywhere - on the artists website and myspace, interviews, and even in the name of the album itself. With this in mind it's necessary to re-approach the album from a fresh standpoint.
"I am to you" gently pulls the eyelids open. A dark haze fills the room, a lone ray of sunlight pierces the darkness and scatters itself upon foreign objects. This is the feeling of recognition. Not of consciousness exactly, but that faint feeling that "this may be real". It is that moment of time where the brain first attempts to differentiate between reality and dreams. The subconscious mind is still actively conjuring up wild dreams, and this is precisely the audible feedback filtering through the cerebellum. The clicks and glitches and pulses and ambiance and voices are merely the activity of electronic signals being passed among the synapses via neurotransmitters. As a listener, the first six songs might remind you of a collaboration between World's End Girlfriend and The Album Leaf, where the surreal meets the real in a car crash scenario.
"The Sleepers" quietly begins to fade back into the realm of a deep sleep. Broad ambiance replaces the quick, twitchy electronic vibe and soon after Vella transitions into drone mode. This abstract canvas is not easy to digest by many, but I'm immediately reminded of the works of Byla and William Basinski. As the sleep segment of the album takes over the music slowly transitions into "background music," that which is soon undistinguishable from the own sounds in your head. "Shipwreck" eventually enters the picture and by this time the music has completely fused with the listener's subconscious and Wake:Sleep is an extension of your own thoughts and feelings.
The last notable on the album is the emotional response which slips in between the cracks of the fuzzy electronica and drone ambiance. As you'd might expect, it's the feeling that often accompanies waking up in the presence of another, arm tingling from lack of circulation and breath heavy and somber. Maybe this is the essential ingredient for the album: someone to share it with. Because, let's be honest, no matter what type of music you listen to, love is always a driving force in all of our lives.
--Jordan Volz
3.5 / 5
Everyone has myspace right? Well go on it and then find some kid with girls’ jeans and hair in his eyes. He will almost undoubtedly be in a ‘brootal’ metalcore band but make bedroom electronica on a cracked copy of reason in his spare time. Go to his ‘side project’ page and press play – what you hear will be pretty much the same as A Lily. This search should take you about 3 minutes at maximum due to the abundance of these people – and that is the reason I can’t get into this album. It’s nice enough sounding but it’s just overdone, it seems as if any child with a computer and a spare afternoon can make it. Maybe that has some relation to the fact this kind of music is always a side project; something the makers take seriously but they don’t want to put it above other things. For the lucky few it has been a road to success, most notably in the case of The Album Leaf - which is an aside from Tristeza for Jimmy LaValle that has pretty much eclipsed the original band now – but for James Vella of Yndi Halda I would probably recommend sticking to his day job.
The album is in fact two different lots of side project material made by James under two separate monikers but all piled onto one disc. There is A Lily, with samples of children and some ethereal vocals overlaid by glitchy clicks and beats, not dissimilar to Decoder Rings’ soundtrack for the film Somersault, and then there is Into the Heavens, Into the Clouds which is the same music but stripped of the samples of children and the ethereal vocals. Oh and the glitchy clicks and beats. Into the Heavens… pieces are almost the background noise of A Lily's tracks so they should sit well amongst them. Unfortunately this isn’t quite so, 6 tracks into the album and the standard 4 minute songs give way to a gargantuan drone segment comprising of the last two tracks. The first of these, at 10 minutes long, is actually almost in keeping with the album's theme and would finish the album nicely, but the second, "Shipwreck", is 35 more minutes of this and it cost the album at least a full star in my rating. The kicker is that I prefer that track, I am a big William Basinski fan and could happily listen to drones for hours, but since it so completely overwhelms the CD with a different style of music it ends up ruining things.
I get the feeling many Yndi Halda fans will be getting this because of the association, but be warned, it is not even comparable – only go for this if you are really, really, dedicated to laptop electronica and you can either bear ambient drone or don’t mind turning off the album halfway through. This is not bad music, just not outstanding – try listening to Stafrænn Hákon instead for a more balanced example of the genre.
--Ian Nicholls
2.5 / 5
Comments
Troy, Michigan
NY/PA
Unsurprisingly, it's a really good chill album. One of my favorites of the year.
glitching post-rock noise
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