Kontakte: Soundtracks to Lost Road Movies
Drifting Falling

Soundtracks To Lost Road Movies is fundamentally two mini-albums with six Kontakte originals comprising the first and remix versions (identically sequenced to the first) the second. On its debut full-length, the London-based outfit serves up a fine-tuned instrumental blend of post-rock and shoegaze with many of the compositions working their way through the requisite peaks and valleys, and the band itself segueing between elegant quietude and volcanic guitar-fueled intensity. Ben Worth, Ian Griffiths, and Paul Burton anchor their epic tracks with electronic beats, and sweetens the songs' gentler episodes with glockenspiel and piano melodies. While the heavier moments are raw and earthy (such as the blistering fire the group stokes near the end of “Life's Road Movies”), the gentler ones are often ethereal in character. Movement's a theme referenced by many of the song titles and the material definitely exudes a powerful sense of forward momentum. The coup de grace is clearly the sixth original “Two and a Half Thousand Miles” which conceivably could be titled in reference to the distance the ten-minute composition ascends as it travels heavenwards. In this slow-burning fireball, the skill and patience with which Kontakte nurtures the piece's celestial mood and sustains its dramatic quality is impressive.

The remixers' half is less cohesive yet still interesting, simply because the individual artists bring their personalized slants to the original material. Twelve (Chris Olley of Six. By Seven) amplifies the lush dimension of “Pacific Coats Highway ” by placing the glockenspiel higher in the mix and giving the guitars a barracuda-like attack in the heavier section. Fellow Drifting Falling artist Matt Bartram amps up the shoegaze intensity on his “Motorik” makeover while Electric Loop Orchestra (aka Death in Vegas's Tim Holmes) mutates “Ghosts Of Electricity” into stuttering pulsations of psychedelic goo. Winterlight brings out the poppy heart buoyantly beating at the shoegaze center of “Life's Road Movies” and Polysicness adds a (sometimes mangled) historical voice sample (one specifically reporting on the nuclear attack on Hiroshima) to a rather fractured take on “Sterile World.” At album's end, Drifting Falling's Oppressed By The Line tackles “Two and a Half Thousand Miles” but doesn't alter the original radically aside from covering it with a textural blanket of rippling static. At seventy-six minutes, Soundtracks To Lost Road Movies is overlong but nevertheless a solid enough coming-out for the trio.

December 2008