Record Review Special

originally published March 17, 2004

THE OLIVIA TREMOR CONTROL

Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle
Cloud Recordings

Black Foliage: Animation Music, Vol. 1
Cloud Recordings

More than any other band that came from the Elephant 6 collective, The Olivia Tremor Control plays music like the '80s and '90s never happened. The coldness of new wave synthesizers, the commercialization of alternative music, they're all blocked out by a fortress of analog tape, bounced tracks, shimmering tube amps, found sounds and drones.
If the old adage holds true that you've got to know how to write beautiful psychedelic rock and pop songs before you can make 10-minute long ambient sound collages, then The OTC arrived well-qualified. Songwriters Bill Doss and W. Cullen Hart have such a natural mastery of gorgeous melody that it's no wonder they spent most of their time layering their songs in studio fuckery; both OTC full-lengths are the products of three years of recording.
1996's Dusk at Cubist Castle, though thought by many to be the band's superior LP, really just introduces the sides of The OTC that would later be more seamlessly integrated.

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The album has roughly two halves; the first half is more direct, with the songs taking precedent over the sounds and effects, while the second half is the opposite. Opener "The Opera House" explodes with psych-rock fuzz guitar, while songs like "Jumping Fences" and "Define a Transparent Dream" display the band's ability to sound fresh while copping the Beatles. Things don't get really strange until the "Green Typewriters" section, which spans tracks 12 through 21; songless sound stretches on for minutes at a time as song ideas come and go, and the longest segment of ambient sound is punctuated with a surprise minute of blown-speaker classic rock guitar. On Dusk, The OTC is a bit timid at times with production experiments on the more direct songs, and the stranger, more sound-based tracks can get a little drowsy.
Black Foliage, however, released in 1999, doesn't have this identity crisis; the songs and the sound experiments are sequenced among each other for an easier front-to-back listen. The songs on Black Foliage are on the whole stronger, with surprising chord progressions and soaring harmonies,

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and the less song-based tracks have more of a point. The title track reappears five times on the record in "animated" form, with the bass guitar melody warped and combined with new sounds and snippets from other songs on the album; other tracks called "combinations" also use parts of other songs on the album to create short collages. The more you listen to Black Foliage, the more you recognize melodic themes weaving in and out of these passages, the more you are comforted by the return of the "Black Foliage" melody. But the reason Black Foliage will be on repeat is for the songs; the start-stop organs and serpentine chorus melody of "A Sleepy Company," the blasting horns of the sublime "Hideway," and the completely a cappella outro of "The Sylvan Screen," which though only 30 seconds long is easily one of the most beautiful moments in recorded music history.
Both Olivia Tremor Control albums can be frustrating at times, and you wonder how they would have been received had they each lasted 45 minutes instead of 70. But that surely misses the point. The band intends for you to listen to these records in their entirety, to wonder why sounds are where they are, to close your eyes and immerse yourself in the listening experience. You won't only have songs stuck in your head, but sounds, with the bizarre world of The Olivia Tremor Control rattling around as you walk back into reality.
Sam Gunn