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Pitchfork Review:
Robin Guthrie - Carousel, Darla; 2009
By Joshua Klein; January 19, 2010
6.5 out of 10
The Cocteau Twins' gauzy sound, by Robin Guthrie's own admission, was something of a happy accident, those sheets of shimmering guitars originally intended to disguise his modest technical skills. And Guthrie's innovations went on to inspire a legion of imitators ranging from lazy shoegaze wannabes to the mighty My Bloody Valentine, though few ever improved upon his approach. That mysterious assemblage of patch chords and pedals at some point evolved from a sound to Guthrie's sound, a sonic palette with a personality all its own.
No surprise, then, that Carousel, Guthrie's first non-soundtrack solo album since 2006's Continental, sounds like one would expect a Robin Guthrie record to sound-- the man and his métier will forever be linked. Like Continental and much of Guthrie's post-Cocteaus work, the disc is instrumental, and like the best ambient music, its impact will vary. Play it quietly and Guthrie's soundscapes will come off pillow-soft; play it loudly and his compositions prove deceptively dense and not exactly prone to gaps and silence.
They are not, however, always memorable, and even though they are concise, they are prone to meander. But that may be the point. Longtime and likeminded Guthrie collaborator Harold Budd would, from the perspective of producer Brian Eno, "write a piece of music, then take out all the notes [he] didn't like," and there's a similar simplicity to Guthrie's songs. Thanks to all the reverberating effects, they don't take that many notes to fill up all the space, and in turn all but demand to recede into the background, like a fog rolling out rather than in. The dynamics of the disc are relatively steady, the melodies redoubtably pretty, the production mostly sanded of any vestigial rough edges or volcanic peaks.
Yet playing in the background, the music is, thanks to its particular provenance, never anonymous, with Guthrie's carefully layered guitars as majestic as ever, rippling away like ancient tapestries given a fresh airing. And every once in a while, your brain wanders away from mood and back to the actual music, ever-evocative songs such as "Sparkle", "Delight", or the particularly dramatic (and relatively oceanic) "Waiting by the Carousel", with each chiming note or sustained chord steeped in Guthrie's substantial history. If gorgeous tracks such as album closer "Little Big Fish" must come as easily to him as breathing, listening to Guthrie exercise his lungs today remains no less entrancing than it was decades ago. It's as if this music has been resonating somewhere in stasis that whole time and has only now been released to catch up with us.
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