Ever hear this abstract li’l panacea? Fate and free will can co-exist: “Your will is a paddle, your body a vessel, on the river of fate. You may choose to move left or right, but fate sees you ultimately downstream.” What a ripoff, right? Philosophy isn’t tug-o-war. A good absolutist doesn’t buy that Baby Buddha nonsense for a second. To wit, Glasgow’s Conquering Animal Sound should dam this shit, but they haven’t decided whether the wonder and evil lurking within their luminescent fungi is worth waking up the baby (you; the listener) over. Take “Wasp,” in which the namesakes “fly into my mouth to die.” This could be the stuff of horror movies, but in Conquering Animal Sound’s steady, unflailing hands, it’s a static image. These songs, then, are some beautifully rendered CGI fantasy stills: delicate, detailed, and eerie but always unthreatening to your fight-or-flight response. I hear some frothy-mouthed volition in the squall halfway through “Giant,” but by then you’re sleepy-eyed and you know that in Conquering Animal Sound’s loop-festooned world, nothing can hurt you. Sure enough, by the end of “Giant,” that squall has been ‘translated’ into Anneke Kampan’s dollhouse-preoccupied hum. The snowglobalization of which I can see, but here we are again: decoration, fixture, unmoving movement.
None of CAS’ paddles, in other words, can actually get you on dry land, though that’s not the worst thing in the world: here, cuteness and creepiness, who have a long history together (‘lo, Cocorosie), never have to confront each other or even make eye contact. CAS’ Freeganic approach smooths all instruments rickety (toy pianos) and clean (midi percussion) into the same glitchy paradigm: the first seconds of the record bask in ringing triangle intervals before synthetic handclaps hit you like a blast of artificial watermelon flavor. The group’s favored instruments of drone — wheezers: your melodicas, your accordions — have a certain tired humanity. Hearing them automatically reset at the beginning of every bar is something like having one’s head inside an iron lung: ever-fading, but unalterable. Part of the reason “Wasp” is one of the album’s more intoxicating songs is that its backing loop, an intravenous dribble of voices each wavering and stretching in different directions at once, has no definite beginning and end.
More of the time, Kampan’s voice sounds above these songs, and for a record so full of beguiling sound-ideas, the implied promise of ‘real songs’ might be its downfall. Listening to Kampan’s unconventional syllabic stresses and unresolved skeins, just about anyone would lazily recall Björk; thing is, not too many musicians have been able to successfully capture Björk’s inductive melodies and backward lyric-shapes, which evolved out of linguistic and emotional necessity. She (Björk) came from somewhere very specific and constructed worlds that did not make things easier for her. I don’t want to jump to conclusions about Kampan’s background or whether she’s, like, exploiting Björk’s lure — since it’s been done so often, anyway — but she has definitely given herself a lot of melodic slack, and a lot of the time it remains slack. It’s almost as if that drifting, puerile feeling is an end in itself. There are moments of uplifting plainness (“Ira”), but I prefer when she gets truly dragged into the electronic mire on “Bear”: if the words “I am a meal for two” don’t chill you like they intend, their claustrophobic aluminum halo will.
“Bear” is the album’s best song, but that feels tactical: they understandably put a lot of work into unifying the song with the best melody, and it owns up that they might’ve produced a more captivating, if nary a more sonically level, album. Elsewhere, there’s clutter (“Tracer”), anything-in-arm’s-reach percussion (“Flinch”) and a botched shot at drone-vista (“Crawl”). None of these are outright failures; this is more or less pretty, interesting glitch-pop. But Kammerspiel gives a continual sense of missed opportunities — to let a melody interact with a single instrument instead of translating like an airline announcement, to shut off the metronome and live without the iron lung for even a few seconds, to dam, as it were, the river of their fate. But perhaps Kammerspiel’s greatest strength is that none of the missed opportunities get up in the listener’s grill. The album’s presented as if it lends itself to close listening, but it would be wiser to resist the urge: listen closely to Kammerspiel, and all you’ll learn is just how it was made, and where’s the enchantment in that?
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