US project IF THOUSANDS is the creative vehicle of guitarist Aaron Molina and multi-instrumentalist Christian McShane, who have explored their particular brand of ambient, drone and post rock since 2000. “For” is their most recent production, initially released through Bandcamp in 2013, and later also as a digital download through US label Silber Records at the start of 2014.
If anything can be said to define this 70 minutes long production, then it is the mood and atmosphere of late autumn. These compositions, or improvisations if you like, all have a dark, mournful and solemn tinge to them. This isn’t an album that will ever merit a description as positive, vibrant, or playful. This is dark music. Often simplistic, at times bordering lo-fi, but always with at least a melancholic sheen, if not downright sad and mournful, and at times with a more menacing, subtly threatening character to it.
Plucked guitars paired of with a drone, at times with additional details and textures thrown in, makes up the greater majority of material at hand. The guitar tends to repeat a motif in cyclic patterns with minor variations, while the drone has more of an ebb and flow character to it, alternating with an addition and subtraction approach that creates a different ebb and flow dynamic to the proceedings. What sounds pretty much like a church organ delivers the main parts of the drones, generally sticking to the darker notes on the register, with infrequent use of mid-tones for variation, while the guitar tends to be light toned, frail and delicate in execution.
Some of the more intriguing constructions are take place when the band reach a bit outside of those perimeters however. Two occasions of haunting guitar and violin excursions, the single track where loud, dramatic drum details are used to very good effect, the occasional creations of multiple layered arrangements with a distinct but subtle increase in intensity to almost majestic proportions before the track in question starts subsiding in intensity again aiming for a delicate conclusion towards silence.
There’s a limited amount of variation at hand here though, even if instrumentation and approach are different the end result are still compositions exploring fairly similar landscapes overall. If that is a positive or a negative description will be a subjective point of view, but personally I enjoyed these slow, deliberate and repetitive journeys into a subtle, late autumn mood landscape. An album that merits an inspection if you’re fond of delicate moods, ambient landscapes and music that tends to focus on atmospheres of the darker kind.
My rating: 80/100
