There’s a clear distinction between brilliant improvisatory acumen and wandering around musically that, through happenstance, occasionally proffers a worthy and rewarding result. The Present, a project helmed by Rusty Santos (the acclaimed producer behind Panda Bear’s Person Pitch and Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs), appears to partake in a very haphazard, aleatoric approach to improvisation on his band’s debut record, World I See. The journey is interesting at times, but it feels misguided.
Opening the album is the daunting “Heavens on Ice,” both establishing the predominant instrumental palette (spectral vocals, clean guitar, twinkling piano, tribal drums, all slathered in copious amounts of reverb and delay) and introducing World I See’s most glaring fault. The song begins with a gorgeous, droning cloud of sound that coalesces into a trebly piano, guitar, and percussion exercise. Five minutes in, it seems as if the band is approaching an exuberant climax, until the instruments unfortunately being to fade, leaving behind only vestiges of tense noise. The band meanders around for awhile, finally stumbling upon an idea worth visiting two minutes later. The rest of the song is dissonant and compelling, but it feels so distinctly removed from the song’s first half that it’s difficult to see why the track wasn’t split.
In fact, the same problem arises on nearly every track. The title track begins with a not-very-compelling drum pattern, then shifts into a frantic, dizzying mélange of chanting, tribal drums, and ambience. All this before the sounds dissolve completely into a tranquil ambient section, with vocal drones and glistening piano swirling around lithely. “Symbols On High” demonstrates the biggest foul yet. The band plays around with delay feedback for a tepid six minutes before finally embarking on the song’s interesting half. The tension slowly grows as an insistent drumbeat gathers momentum. As soon as the listener feels an impending climax, though, the music stops completely, resulting in one of the most unfulfilling sections of the album.
Despite the pratfalls throughout, World I See still offers some redeeming qualities. “Heavens on Ice,” though left curiously undivided, has several great sections. After a trying two-and-a-half minutes of delayed finger-snap feedback, “Africanized Beatniks” becomes beatific and playful (until the band changes course yet again). Meanwhile, the majority of “Love Melody,” before the tired second section begins, is a pretty, free-form meditation in the same vein of Animal Collective’s “The Bees.”
Still, while there are certainly moments of near-sublime lucidity on World I See, they are few and far between. Rusty Santos knows his way around the studio, but he doesn’t convey the sense of wonder or singular vision heard so clearly in Sung Tongs or Person Pitch. Instead, The Present simply seem bleary-eyed and lethargic. Although lenience should be considered since World I See was heavily improvised, it lacks enough truly captivating material to keep it from drowning in its dense auditory fog.