Five Points Fincastle

Treble's second solo album away from Désormais, Five Points Fincastle, unsurprisingly often works in the vein of shoegaze guitar/IDM combinations of that band, something increasingly common in the era of Ulrich Schnauss and Pluramon, not to mention Fennesz. Treble's take on the form solo is often fairly understated but no less evocative for that, with the CD's seven songs producing gently mesmerizing, sometimes haunting results. The Accelera Deck-sampling "A Serious House on Serious Earth" may have a fairly dour title, but the music blends darker, lower rhythm textures with a gently rising collage of brighter notes and loops, resolving into a mid-paced drift that suddenly cuts to a very Fennesz-like swirl of sound. The blissout atmospherics on "Department 348" are mixed well down, providing a strange, half-heard bed for a calm, sad lead guitar figure, sounding a bit lost. The cut-ups and crackles that open "Airlift" lead to a series of core melodic loops, further tweaked and interspersed with radio burst noise here and there, then melding into the murky disco pulse and industrial grinds of "The Distance Between Us in KM," soft tones providing the counterpoint. Other songs, like "Stranded," suggest more of the crumbling distortion and overload of the Xpressway label from New Zealand, reworked into an electronic context but with comparatively less soothing elements than elsewhere on the album. The one vocal collaboration, with Jenna Robertson from Avia Gardner on "I Was There for the Last Kiss But Never Saw the Ambulance Leave," is fair rather than striking, her voice quietly anonymous amid the sometimes surprisingly lush arrangement.