An outfit started in 2005 by Jason Albertini, who is also in Duster and was recently the bass player for Built To Spill, Helvetia has always been a revolving door of musicians playing alongside Albertini. These days, that includes Steve Gere and Samantha Stidham as Albertini is now a Portland, Oregon resident, which is where he recorded this ninth Helvetia record.<\/p>\n
\u201cDevastating Map\u201d starts the listen, and it’s an adventurous beginning where crisp percussion meets warm guitars in the experimental lo-fi setting that touches on psychedelic tendencies, too. The following tracks, \u201cInverted\u201d and \u201cReaktor,\u201d follow a somewhat similar course, where the former moves languidly with fuzzy, spacey ideas and the latter jangles a bit with talk\/singing at a quick pace.<\/p>\n
\u201cCar Crash,\u201d the highlight of the first half, then moves swiftly with acoustic guitar, pounding drums, and plenty of aberrant manipulation in its brief yet triumphant chaos.<\/p>\n
Back half standouts include the dreamy \u201cLove Me,\u201d as well as the off-kilter, eccentric surf rock tendencies of the warbly \u201cWe Are Reels.\u201d Near the end, \u201cThose Eyes\u201d builds into a squealing, sonically challenging mashing of noise and melody, and the piano friendly \u201cLong Beach\u201d exits the listen with a welcomed surprise of more straight forward song craft.<\/p>\n
Albertini’s vision of pop is certainly atypical as he populates This Devastating Map<\/i> with bizarre guitar noises, unique chord progressions, and basically unidentifiable genre mashing that brings in traces of his full band work with Duster and Built To Spill. Those with a very careful ear might locate similarities to the early days of Modest Mouse and Elliott Smith, too.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The Pacific Northwest isn’t short on unconventional music these days, and Helvetia is certainly an experience that those with a taste for the adventurous task of home recording will appreciate and admire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89,"featured_media":34141,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[10558],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-45972","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-helvetia","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/89"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45972"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45972"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}