{"id":2357,"date":"2015-06-16T11:49:36","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T10:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyeplug.net\/magazine\/?p=2357"},"modified":"2011-07-17T20:49:59","modified_gmt":"2011-07-17T20:49:59","slug":"crystal-antlers-%e2%80%93-%e2%80%98two-way-mirror%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/crystal-antlers-%e2%80%93-%e2%80%98two-way-mirror%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"Crystal Antlers \u2013 \u2018Two-Way Mirror\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

(album, Recreation Ltd)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Long Beach combo Crystal Antlers second album sees the group re-emerge from a period of creative development as something of a chimera. There\u2019s a form of structured disarray extant here that, on the one hand, establishes the eleven songs (with the possible exception of the more orthodox closer \u2018Dog Days\u2019) as a consistent corpus, while a combination of sudden lurches into irregular time signatures, and a tumbling rhythmic quality impart a sense of individual songs teetering on the verge of implosion.<\/p>\n

The diverse range of influences that the band have brought to bear across Two-Way Mirror<\/em> has an equally bi-polar effect ensuring that much of the material on display sounds, at times, a little like something else, and yet like nothing else. The band\u2019s sonic template is established with opening track \u2018Julie\u2019s Story\u2019, which fires staccato bursts of fractured sound across a coruscating nightmare backing. Similarly, discordant elements prevent most of the album settling into any sort of melodic comfort zone \u2013 the churning, melancholic \u2018S\u00e9ance\u2019 and the insistent organ-infused \u2018Always Afraid\u2019 in particular. Similarly, there\u2019s a lot of serrated sound drifting across the sonic miasma; \u2018Summer Solstice\u2019 takes a steak knife to its subdued anthemic qualities, rendering it counter-intuitively both expansive and claustrophobic, and the suitably uneven \u2018By The Sawmill\u2019 uses similar aural tropes to frame a backwoods melodrama that becomes disorientated amid its own bucolic instrumental hinterland.<\/p>\n

Two-Way Mirror<\/em>\u2019s urgent and unsettling title track provides the album\u2019s high-point, sounding at times a little like an indie interpretation of Arthur Lee\u2019s canon, largely on account of Cora Foxx\u2019s fever dream organ contribution. After the sub-My Bloody Valentine processed sound etherea of \u2018Way Out\u2019, this subtle garage motif is extended by the rambling \u2018Fortune Telling\u2019, which develops a type of leaden stridency as it progresses.<\/p>\n

\u2018Knee Deep\u2019 is perhaps Two-Way Mirror<\/em>\u2019s most frustrating element, as it evokes a genuinely affecting sense of Barrett-esque psychedelic dislocation and then sets about undermining it with some over-emotive vocals and a guitar solo that appears to have arrived on loan from Big Country. \u2018Sun Bleached\u2019, a lo-fi, effects laden elegy, leads us to the terminus of the aforementioned \u2018Dog Days\u2019, which sees the band assaulting their own anthemic, hooky rock conformity with unexpected time changes, before Carlos Santana apparently wanders in to deliver a guitar solo.<\/p>\n

Two-Way Mirror<\/em> is arguably best viewed as a single stir of a melting pot that would have benefitted from a little less restraint. Ideally, the Antlers will go on to take the more extreme elements of what remains a nascent sound and develop it into something truly remarkable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(album, Recreation Ltd) Long Beach combo Crystal Antlers second album sees the group re-emerge from a period of creative development as something of a chimera. There\u2019s a form of structured disarray extant here that, on the one hand, establishes the eleven songs (with the possible exception of the more orthodox closer \u2018Dog Days\u2019) as a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,88,71,86],"tags":[429,151,121,430],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-garage","category-indie","category-music","category-rock","tag-crystal-antlers","tag-dick-porter","tag-eyeplug","tag-two-way-mirror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2357"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=2357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}