I'd never heard of these guys before but I was looking through some concert listings and I saw their name and when I read "Big Pink" I thought it might have been a "The Band" cover band (their debut album was called "Music from the Big Pink") but what I found was a new and interesting shoe-gaze/electronic band from England.
Just for anyone who might not know that much about noise-rock or shoe-gaze these two genres are characterized by their use of feedback and feedback like textures as either the lead instrument or as ambience in a band's songs. Shoe-gaze is more traditional than noise-rock which sometimes can be atonal and really out there; shoe-gaze takes its name from the habit of musicians of the genre (like My Bloody Valentine) to gaze, during shows, at the large number of effects pedals at their feet. Shoe-gaze makes use of lots of different echo, delay, flange, chorus, and phaser effects to distort keyboard, vocal, guitar, and bass tones creating an immersive soundscape that can sound even psychedelic at times. The first of these genres (noise-rock) is more likely to eschew traditional pop music structures and instruments while the second (shoe-gaze) often relies mostly pop time signatures, song lengths, and chords in conjunction with lots of effects.
The music arrangement of The Big Pink is pretty traditional, using standard tonality, but relies less on guitars than say a shoe-gaze band like My Bloody Valentine would and instead uses organ, keyboard, and sampled textures along with electronic drum beats. I'd say that the band is of the electronic genre but with a strong shoe-gaze influence. Now that I've gone through my snobbish genre explanation I'll proceed to the actual content of the album.
Though most of the songs on the album are solid, accessible, tracks, I'm impressed with the amount of experimentation that goes on. "Introduction to Awareness" for example, relies on a repetitive bass-line, tambourine, interesting but not distracting feedback tones, and spacey almost incomprehensible vocals punctuated by a hypnotic organ-like an accompaniment. If the instrumentation were different, this track could find itself right at home in the 60s along with the likes of the Velvet Underground. It's experimental without being self-indulgent and makes order out of what must sound from the list, a series of chaotic sounds. But then you have several tracks like "At War with the Sun", "Dominos", "Count backwards from Ten" (perhaps my favorite track of the entire album), and "Velvet" (which won the band some critical acclaim from Pitchfork) scream complete accessibility for anyone looking to jump into shoe-gaze.
I love everything about this album and am going to cut my review off here since I could go on gushing about how much I liked it.
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