Keeping things simple with one disappearing/reappearing wistful guitar, (unintelligible) vocal figure, and some spacey acoustic meandering, The Blithe Sons laze around sleepily through the opening ten minutes of this album. Sort of a gentler cousin of the more unbridled Animal Collective, these guys take a similarly loose tact with their sprawling and sparsely percussive vacuum.
Like with Growing, this album is for those out there who want to take the leap without the comforting hooks or chuckles accompanying a Books release. Difficult music. But Selected Ambient Works Vol.2 was difficult for me at first, and it took an elaborate dream in which the music on those two CDs were featured to make me understand just how vivid a seemingly abstract composition can become if you let it.
A song like Gastr Del Sol's "Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder" sinking in is such a surprise and a reward that I try to take pause when I come across music as amorphous as that on We Walk the Young Earth. "Green Patterns" is the least interesting, yet I still get a butterflies-inducing realization of how it's wrapped around me even after I've seemingly pushed it to the background. The centerpiece track returns to the Califone-soaked acoustic strumming sparingly featured on the opener mixed with a murky and cavernous echo and more strange muffled singing.
While the soggy-bottom production mixed with rampant experimentation is a promising alchemy, Blithe Sons are (depending on your mood) dusty, half-remembered dreams, or dingy half-assed improvisations. Me, I like what I hear, until it keeps returning to the same mincing tactics of hushed warbles and vaguely anticipatory acoustic intonations.
So, intriguing, but this scale of risk with form in improvisation has been tackled much more satisfyingly by other artists. I'd recommend it as solid excursion for lovers of everything ambient (splendid cricket sounds on track four).
1. The Book of Names
2. Green Patterns
3. All Children's Faces Looking Upwards
4. The Oldest Living Things
5. We Walk the Young Earth
More about: The Blithe Sons
