New Album All the Way Brings (Almost) Danceable Rhythms to their Ambient Noodles

The almost dance-friendly grooves of Growing's new Social Registry album All the Way constitute a conceptual leap from the spare and minimal textures of their 2003 Kranky Records release The Sky Runs into The Sea.  If this album is your first experience with Growing, the differences might make a fun listening exercise.  However, fans who became comfortable with Growing's 2003-2004 sound may agree with Village Voice columnist Justin Farrar that they have "devolv[ed]...  into a Black Dice knockoff."  In their earlier period, Growing built off a foundation of ambient guitar recalling Keiji Haino or even Eno, complimented by easy-listening twinkles and twitters, and easily droning into plodding doom sludge reminiscent of Toronto's Nadja or Houston's Black Boned Angel.  Today their sound is rhythm-oriented, even lively, if still somewhat abstract and cerebral.  Indeed, All the Way does happily evoke the Black Dice of Beaches and Canyons on some tracks and the arguably edgier Black Dice of Load Blown on others.  Certainly, Fuck Button's 2008 release Street Horrrsing is a fair comparison, but Growing's effort sets itself apart with a little dose of underground disco-fun.  

            In fact, if the first track "Green Flag" got married to a thumping house beat, the couple might settle down to have a few kids and a mortgage at a rave in 1996.  Gone are the obsessively building textures, the tension and release, the seventeen minute crescendo to silence cycle.  Instead of the chill sounds of Jessamine or Stars of the Lid, the new album might hang out in a playlist with Autechre and Flakmask.  Several reviews have already noted that the aesthetic differences between their old home of Olympia, Washington and their new home of Brooklyn New York are all over this album: where there was a hippie space-jam feeling to the post-whatever vibe before, now things are pretty tight and sound finely groomed and self-consciously chaotic.  Complementing this change is some really great stereo separation and production work, and tracks that clock in at a slightly more comfortable six minutes.  On the other hand, the Sky Runs into the Sea generously offered sonic service for over an hour, while All the Way leaves you wanting more a little over a half hour in.

            Sure, some tracks are a bit weaker than one might hope.  The second track "Wrong Ride" sounds for all the world like someone playing an Atari through a loudspeaker as they drive in circles around a race track, about which my senior-citizen mom says in a disapproving voice:  "it's a combination of smooth and mellow and chaos."  Moreover, the final track, "Reconstruction," prominently features a chorus drenched guitar that sounds like an organ with heavy compression, as played on a computer with inadequate RAM.  To Growing’s credit , the overdubbed machinery-like noises that evoke flocks of robotic birds or futuristic crickets on this same track sound cool enough, almost making up for that annoying is my laptop broken? feeling.

            Where the Sky Runs in to the Sea (builds drama in) unfocused sliding from sludge to doom-jam to ambient, even offering some guitar tone that sounds like a drunken Steve Vai playing Norwegian Wood, All the Way plays off the interesting dichotomy between vague and subtle passages and passages that coalesce out of the Music Concrete ether into something like a 1980s New Age dance party.  Short loops come in and out of synchronization with squeaks and chirps filling out the texture.  There are very few fleeting glimpses of the doom metal guitar tone that was one of the signature sounds of the previous effort  Typically by four minutes in, the sounds have started to come together into a pulsing beat, and by the end of the track they have come all disassembled again into a complexly repeating cacophony.   For my ears, it is a pleasing formula.

3.5 out of 5 Wooves