Artist : MaseratiAlbum : Inventions for the New Season (3rd Domestic LP)
Release : 06.19.07
Year Founded : 2000
Label Name : Temporary Residence
Catalog # : 120
Packaging Type : Single-Disc Jewel Case
Members : Matthew Cherry, Coley Dennis, Gerhardt Fuchs, Steven Scarborough
Runtime : 46:28Area Tour Dates : None at time of publication
Sound Season : Winter
iTunes Worthy Tracks : Show Me the Season, The World Outside
Sounds Like : Explosions in the Sky Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever
Rating : A-
Instrumental music ought to be engaging enough to make your brain try to illustrate the sound. Anything that I imagine while listening to Maserati's Inventions for the New Season ends up being cinematic. It's usually aerial views from a plane or a helicopter of bombs being dropped, things blowing up, people fleeing, enveloping chaos. It's apocalyptic. The moments of serenity are as frightening as the moments of upheaval. Sometimes it's time-lapse photography of animals or insects preying on eachother. Sometimes it's simply the opening credits — a landscape at dawn, the view out a car window. Most important to note is that there is always a passage of some sort, whether it be of time or of place or of mind.
In this way, Inventions for the New Season offers little in the way of instant gratification. Everything takes time. Everything is a development of what has come before. Everything is a natural progression. Whether that progression is toward the ultimate destruction or salvation of the world that Maserati helps create is open to interpretation.
Musically, Maserati sound like the dark side of The Mercury Program (who they appeared on a split EP and LP with). They use layers of either prickly and delayed or fuzzy and omnipotent guitar, swirling bass, and unifying drums.
Previous albums had slightly more defined edges. They were more contained, less massive. It's like 37:29:24 (their debut album) was the isolationist Maserati and Inventions for the New Season is the world-view Maserati. The bass was more talkative, more loopy — it broke up the sound a bit more than it does here. It provided much-needed contrast to the drenched aural field. Scarborough gets back to that aesthetic somewhat on "Show Me the Season," but otherwise is mostly status quo.
Although there are some departures, Inventions for the New Season is a significantly satisfying album. With fewer and fewer of the post-rock set interested in or able to tell these stories of cataclysm, Maserati are certainly among the ruling class.
4 comments:
i love your imagery in this one. you should direct music videos for them.
great for crusin' on nice summer days
Hey, Brian--
I haven't commented on your recent submissions because I had to learn that reading them at work was entirely futile. I'm in no frame of mind to read anything worthwhile when the phone's ringing, or the front door is dinging, or when Dr. L___ is stinking up the place with his coffee-breath.
So anyway, after giving myself proper time to read the last three blogs, I was able to rediscover why I like them so much. And here it is:
"They use layers of either prickly and delayed or fuzzy and omnipotent guitar, swirling bass, and unifying drums."
You described music by using the word, "prickly." I like that. I may not know what this particular prickly music sounds like, but I can identify with prickly. I DON'T know what swirling bass sounds like, but that's okay because it sounds like you're stirring a pot of music soup with the neck of a bass guitar, and that's imagery I'm happy with. Not only that, but there are LAYERS of prickly, swirling, fuzzy music, and now you've got me so into the words that I don't even have to know what the music sounds like.
Good work, Hogue.
--ellen
incoming toilet humor:
hehe, you said prickly.
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