MV & EE with the Golden Road
Drone Trailer
(DiCristina)
Even if you hate MV & EE’s Drone Trailer, you have to at least tip your hats to the aptness of the album title. Call it any number of made-up genres: “Noise folk,” “Rootsy feedback,” or simply “Drone Trailer.” Indeed, the six songs here drone on and on for a full 40 minutes. From Matt Valentine’s (aka MV) tone-deaf vocals to Erika Elder’s (EE) distorted mandobird, MV and EE dump a heap of noise on the wax. Yet MV & EE simultaneously evoke the pastoral simplicity of a trailer on the open range through 12-string guitar strums, whispery lap and pedal steel guitars, and the innocence of MV’s aforementioned tone-deaf vocal chops. This is an album of stark binaries. MV/EE, beauty/ugliness, innovation/repetition and all other contradictions a droning trailer park brings to mind.
It may sound like an overly intellectual listen, but MV and EE are more concerned with the visceral than the analytical. The sextet of tunes on Drone Trailer hit with an unsettling mix of elements that depending on your mood will either sound as unpleasant as a choir of rats or as lovely as a lake of swans. The objective truth is probably somewhere in between. Album opener “Anyway” pumps with a folkgaze pulse, as EE’s preciously unpolished vocals square off with an onslaught of guitars. The chaotic opener mellows into a quaint keyboard part for a few bars and then it’s gone. It’s a promising start that’s never quite built upon. MV handles the vocals for most of Drone Trailer’s remainder, and the overall tone is noticeably less frantic. Guitars continue to clank and whirl under MV’s ramblings on “Weatherland Hollow” and feedback coats the horizon of Neil Young inspired “The Hungry Stones,” but the prominent emphasis is mostly on the mellow pace and tectonically slow evolution of the songs.
MV has a divisive voice that most will either love or hate. It’s almost always flat, and it somehow possesses both the high whine of Wayne Coyne and the droll of Ben Stein. When it combines with EE’s rough but much more accessible whimper, the results are unique and often successful. But on the 10+ minutes of “Weatherland Hollow,” it all begins to wear quite thin, which is a bit of a problem when you’re only three songs into the album. Since the electricity of “Anyway” never resurfaces, we must endure the same basic atmosphere for another 20 minutes or so. When the Flaming Lips did this brand of noisy folk for a track or two on their pre-Transmissions from the Satellite Heart albums it was always a welcome detour. But a whole album is sure to grate on all but the most devout fans’ patience. |
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