Scattered & Buried

Distorted guitars can sound either harsh and jagged or soft and pillowy. The Danish band Foreign Resort take an approach that lands somewhere in the middle: the individual guitars are harshly distorted, but they're massed and layered in such a way that they shimmer and coruscate like an enormous cloud bank with lightning flickering inside it. Scattered & Buried is a strange album, a jumble of new songs, newly recorded old ones, and remixes. But it succeeds anyway, because the new songs are very good and the old ones are worth hearing again in their new settings. Melodies tend to be a bit vague, yet there's something deeply compelling about these songs; maybe it's the subtly cathartic chord changes, which move almost tectonically but with a clear emotional logic, or maybe it's the way that jangly guitar lines will suddenly rise to the surface with an Echo & the Bunnymen sort of clarity. There's also the element of strategic juxtaposition: "Delayed" is a hot mess of bright guitars, drums that sound like they're hurrying to keep up, and laconic vocals. On "Buried" and "Lost My Way" the singer sounds startlingly like the Cure's Robert Smith, while the band plays like My Bloody Valentine on uppers. "Tide" is slower and less frenetic, but by no means softer; "Orange Glow [Novachild Remix]," on the other hand, does start out relatively softly, with an almost funky beat and a general mood that falls somewhere between dreamy and resigned — then it lurches back into wall-of-distortion territory. Apart from the drearily house-inflected "Opening Act [Evol Temptation Mix]," everything on this album is well worth hearing, and more than once.