The individuals that comprise Heaven And – Martin Siewart, Tony Buck, Steve Heather, and Zeitblom – meet at an interstice where highly wrought artifice and natural growth meet in the music’s play of precise fine detail and textured feeling. With great ease do the players attain to a collective expression; less attention is paid to petty proclivities, more to certain necessary ineluctable signs of metamorphosis, the result of which is a certain seductive quality that permeates the recording like an entrancing perfume.
It’s a rich melange of strange gurgles and twangs, vigorous in style, and prone to eruption and wry allusion. Siewart’s playing on guitar, keyboard, and electronics is generally fragmented for effect, but it also defines robust figures. On drums and percussion, Buck too is emphatic, even when he is stringing together an unlikely, and at times garrulous, patchwork of remote percussive idioms. Together the various instances and variations drawn from these basic constituent parts give rise to a sound rippling with the unity of surreal vision, with meshes of images at once vividly delineated and continuously melting, dazzling rays promiscuously mingling with psychic shadows.
Although one of the less raucous tracks found on the album, even “Scarlet Woman” clearly has a devilish glint in its eye. Deep, low guitar tones are overlaid with gritty, wobbling percussion and crude electronic effects, and soon the piece hangs heavy like humidity before the thunderstorm. It’s also one of the two tracks on which Alexander Hacke’s baritone tinges the proceedings, complementing the atmosphere, and personalizing the sleazy rhythmic convolutions. A good many other works create and feed off of disruptive fractures and unadulterated battering along frequencies of vaguely jazz and blues-like bents. In cynically subverting itself at every turn, the album as a whole amounts to an audacious and ramshackle pastiche, replete with a curmudgeonly mood swings guaranteed to lead one down a primrose path.
Max Schaefer
