Private Cinema is exhausting. After listening to it all the way through, you’ll feel like you just harvested 30 acres of cash crops, waxed all the wood on your Irish ship-captain uncle’s boat, and swept up all the garbage in New York City. Thing is, this isn’t the sort of task you’ll dread. If anything, you’ll bask in the self-satisfied glow of achievement for a few minutes, reflecting on what you’ve just accomplished like an Olympic skater that just culled years of practice and parental pressure into a medal or a bathroom-supplies salesman that just moved 20 units of urinal cakes. Ahhhhh, yes, the sweet taste of a hard day’s work.
Contrary to what members of Slaraffenland seem to believe, their music isn’t memorable because it contains oh-so-played-out sax wonk-wonk-ing, flute-fluttering, and other tricks cheaper than Rick Nielson. The strengths of this Danish-born band are most closely related to their somber dedication to dark moods and compositions that go on as long as they have to and not a second more or less. These for-many elusive skills supply the wind beneath Private Cinema’s wings and the fuel for its many fires, which tend to flare up at just the right time and subside before the roaring red trucks arrive on the scene. Dousing their less-welcoming arrangements with occasional moments of standard Sonic Youth picking/drumming also works in the band’s favor, lending levity to sonic squalls that might have otherwise trailed off into territory too grating for its own good.
And when they’re not trying to blow out every eardrum within a square-mile radius, their penchant for multiple instruments provides an uncanny sense of variety. “Watch Out” parlays sax and horns into a lovely post-Fugazi/SY guitar jam; “Groen” finds screeching gold at the end of a tom-tom rainbow with well-placed feedback bursts; and “Ghosts” uses backward-loop clips and tinkling chimes to create a warm cocoon for its soft guitar swipes to cozy up to before a tribal stomp oozing trombone and melodica breaks free and chases the clouds.
As mentioned, all this beauty would be for not if Slaraffenland didn’t anticipate the perfect moments to alternately clutter, kink, or streamline the flow of their songs. Handling these tunes with kid-gloves would have yielded yet another practice in aimless dissonance, so to hear experimentalism delivered with such respectful reverence is a treat for the ears and a boon for the brain. It’s easy to crawl into this quintet’s closet, even for those not well-versed in the music of Slaraffenland’s peers; that alone strikes an argument for the increased viability of an artform that at times is too suffocating for its own good but soooo magical when groomed and pruned by the right pair of scissors.
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