Rigil’s velvety voice swims in and out of focus among echoing electric guitar, fuzzy harmonics, and frosted forests of electronics on Concertina Heart, the twenty year old’s debut effort. While little is done to disrupt this equilibrium, the sections are tautly constructed, and stutter onward, their spectrum of cluster-harmony morphing slowly as it incorporates new tone colors as the album progresses.
Compositions first hang thick with false nostalgia: delicate keyboards waver and outline distant harmonic patterns, overlaid with scratchy pads, while a guitar splinters the space into ever escalating degrees of subtlety. From here Rigil trims these sprawling tracks back to spare drones and subtle pulsing, before they finally flow onto fields of fresh orchestral colors. The album fizzles with ideas aplenty. And although the odd section, particularly the more overtly vocal-led works, seem nascent in comparison to others (indeed, to say nothing of his hackneyed attempts at lyricism, Rigil’s vocal theatrics most plainly reveal his age, and those with an aversion to all things ‘indie’ will find their allergies quickly acting up), there is little denying his ability to build up definable peaks and have them gently subside like a blurry shadow.
Structure matters, then, but certain tracks are content to engage sounds themselves: “Wheatfields” is a flowing liquid in which certain details emerge now and again like bubbles shimmering to the surface – hollow sounds of plucked strings, a distorted keyboard melody, elegiac waterfalls of sound, and so on. Such developments send a chill through the tracks and open up the somewhat stiff arrangements. Were he to develop this ear for detail, the works would be the better for it. Regardless, Rigil shows some skill and imagination in the establishment of structure and texture in his first foray.
Max Schaefer
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