Circulatory System – Signal Morning – Album Review

(Editor’s Note: There’s a lot going on at Citizen Dick world headquarters.  As Kevin described on Sunday, three-fifths of us are prepping to return to school.  At the time of this writing, I’m a mere 36 hours away from sitting through my building’s opening meeting.  Two days after that, I’ve got students streaming into my classroom.  To be perfectly honest, I’m thinking a little more about my third period algebra class than I am about Circulatory System.  Add in the three hours I watched my aunt’s three-month old today, my need to take my garbage out, the second consecutive week of stupidly hot August weather and I’m in danger of not being on my A-game for the following review.  Happily, Circulatory System’s Signal Mornings is an album that’s easy to praise; if it looks like this one is phoned in, it’s only because I’m both losing my mind and the record is really good.  Hopefully that is both reasonably sensical and acceptable.)

This is going to sound overblown.  I’ve tried to find a way around it, given my general trend towards keeping the names of canonical records out of my mouth, but there’s really no better way to encapsulate Circulatory System’s upcoming sophomore record, Signal Mornings, than this: it sounds like the bastard child of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Kid A.  No joke.  Now I’m not about to take the position that it’s quite as good as either of those records (that would be heretical, potentially), but the record’s equal doses of high-period, classical psychedelia and tuneful electronic manipulation reek of those two records.  There’s a clear line of fidgety business on the album, in that there’s always a slew of instrumentation blanketing the tracks; there’s not a lot of spareness here.  Given that much of that instrumentation is bathed in a hazy bit of fuzz and distortion, it’s easy to see the influence of paisley-clad acid eaters.  The flipside of that splash of swirling color is the deeply experimental use of electronics and tape manipulation.  Many of the tracks lurch in one direction before hiccuping electronically and veering into computer-laced mayhem.  To go back to the original comparison, imagine “Everything in its Right Place” played on top of “Fixing a Hole” and you’re getting close to the sound.

The record opens with a stomping bit of fuzzed out intensity, “Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant.”  It lays the groundwork for much of the first half of the record with an incessantly catchy groove, occasional stops and electronic diversions and late-entering, soaring multi-tracked vocals.  It might be my favorite track on the record (Which is strange, in that I don’t think that too many first tracks stick with me the way this one does.  “Pop Song 89,” “Black Sabbath” and “Misunderstood” all spring to mind, but I feel like, generally, the best tracks are usually a bit deeper in the record.  Am I wrong here?)  Things get a bit more raucous and scattered on the album’s second half; after the bruising “Blasting Through,” the songs seem to have a slightly more aggressively abstract feel, with a lot of dissolution and radical changes.  Given the album’s length, seventeen tracks, this kind of obvious dichotomy is welcome.  The brighter side 1 contrasts well with the darker, more complex side 2.  “Blasting Through” itself does wild things with the repeated lyric, “you’re on the outside blasting through,” running the words through a broad variety of manipulations.  It would sound slightly out of place, perhaps, after something like the optimistic “This Morning (We Remembered Everything)” and it’s almost stereotypically beatnik refrain: “This morning we remembered everything and the sky came down and tapped us on the shoulder.”  There’s some diversion and atonality on the track, but the overall message seems to be a positive one, as the track emerges from some sonic bleakness.  This makes sense on side 1, just as heavier bits like “Blasting Through” make sense on side 2.

Signal Mornings has been in production for seven years, the end result of untold hours of recording.  (That alone blows my mind.  Remember 2002?  Me neither.)  Composer and musician W. Cullen Hart has multiple sclerosis and, given the record’s repeated descriptions of struggle, metaphysical and otherwise, seems to have been influenced, at least lyrically, by that experience.  (I do the special education thing during the day, so I’m reluctant to use pejorative terms like “stricken with” and “struggles through,” let alone attribute anything broad to a disabling condition without rapping with the dude first.  Given that I’m not totally certain that the M.S. thing is relevant, I was a bit reluctant to include it, but full disclosure and all that.)  A product of the always interesting Elephant 6 folks, the record features all members of Olivia Tremor Control and (this bit is exciting) Jeff Mangum and Julian Koster of the late great Nuetral Milk Hotel.  Sadly, I got the record digitally and am liner notes-less, so can’t report in detail on who plays what on which tracks.  That said, the overall sonic richness of the record implies that lots of folks are doing lots of things on all the tunes.  (This might be the thing that pisses me off the most about the digital age.  I love liner notes.  Now I only see them on the rare occasions when I have the physical article in my hands and, too often, they’re horribly truncated.  I sound like a pissy old man, don’t I?)

There are a lot of specific moments to love on this record: the free-jazz-esque horns on “Tiny Concerts,” the repeated refrain “Why not try to breathe along with the universe” on, naturally, “The Breathing Universe,” the unexpected gentleness of “I You We” and the cacophonous disruption of “Particle Parades.”  Broadly, the record is good.  It’s perhaps a touch overlong, but given the length of time leading to its completion, that’s understandable.  The constant sense of exploration and experimentation is welcome.  The track below, “Overjoyed” points to some of the pleasures of the record, but this is one you’re going to want to hear all the way through on September 8.

Circulatory System – Overjoyed

Pre-order Circulatory System at insound.