(There's a fascinating dichotomy inside of Black Earth, the first official album from Chicago quartet Implodes. Stylistically, it's almost schizophrenic-- tracks alternate between shoegaze, Krautrock, post-rock, experimental drone, and acoustic ambiance, and those modes don't often meet together in one place. Yet the overall mood is forcefully consistent, with a weight approaching gravitational pull. That tone is captured somewhat in the cover art's stark silhouettes, but even that image is a little too colorful for this hazy, shadow-filled sound-cloud. Whenever I listen, I picture the music emanating from a mesmerizing field of TV static, roughly like what the little girl stared into in Poltergeist's iconic image.
That may seem a bit overdramatic, but Implodes sound like they take their music pretty seriously, and they should. It's carefully crafted and wholly enveloping, a kind of dream-state atmosphere where vocals shiver behind layers of fuzz, rhythms detonate like underwater explosions, and acoustic guitars drift in and out like flashes of déjà vu. Some tracks on their own might sound a bit derivative-- "Marker"'s floating noise has a Slowdive tint, "Screech Owl" bears the spooky lurch of early Sonic Youth, and the slow melodrama of Mogwai slips into "Song for Fucking Damon II (Trap Door)". Others pass through corridors of the Kranky catalog, skirting spaces between Labradford, Bowery Electric, and Jessamine. But when fused together by Implodes' assured sense of narrative thrust, these songs are much more echoes than mimicry-- like an unfamiliar, moonlit landscape dotted with fleeting glimpses of past ghosts.
All of which makes for a pretty heavy listen. Dense, dark, and slow even when it's fast, Black Earth can get murky and claustrophobic, sucking in the air around it. There's a fine line between mesmerizing and depressing, and while I find myself squarely on the entranced side throughout, I can see where others might find the dimmer passageways more blinding than beckoning. But this is where the band's stylistic diversity helps. While a deep drone like "Oxblood" may burrow the center of the earth, it's immediately countered by the motoring sway of "Meadowlands", or the hymn-like buzz of "Wendy", or the lilting blur of "Experiential Report". Which is why the most interesting thing about Black Earth is what it bodes for Implodes' future. If they can already mold this many sounds into the same tonal shape, imagine what further sonic territory they might someday place their stamp on).
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