Review: Charles Atlas, Felt Cover
Equal parts delicate, affecting, and distressing, Felt Cover, the latest offering from Charles Atlas (featuring ex-Piano Magic guitarist Charles Wyatt, former Rosemarys keyboardist Matt Greenberg, and Tony Conrad student Alex Kort) is an extended exercise in spirit-rattling tonal juxtaposition and spacious composition. Ten tracks of concerted piano, delayed guitar, treated trumpet, cello, and innumerable electronic washes and colors, Felt Cover is a more experimental and sonically varied work than the previous ambient release Play The Spaces, and more of a whole than Two More Hours, their startling debut. Progressing from the electronic swirl of "Miniature Lifeboats" to the skewed ice cream truck melody of "Another Movement," through the brushed drums reminiscent of Badalamenti in "Valdivia" and the echoing guitar work in "Minor White" worthy of Moon and the Melodies-era Cocteau Twins, CA recapitulates and recontextualizes a library of sounds both warm and unsettling. Brittle, nearly-subliminal touches on the album (courtesy of producer and ex-Swell member Monte Vallier) include a harrowing, barely-audible text reading that lays a menacing foundation beneath "The Light They Intend For You," and a recording of children that introduces the title track, an elegaic re-examination of Felt's "Magellan." "Imprints Lengthwise," the too-short closer, boasts a melody that would make Low cry.

The first CD release from Static Caravan (the original home of new 4AD signings Magnetophone and Sybarite), Felt Cover is an adroit consonance of the electronic and the analog, nostalgia and prescience.

Labels: charles atlas, reviews