Sirhan Duran are a new band from Seattle. It's got members of Voyager One as well as Sub Pop (sort-of) buzz band Kinski. This is their debut, it's self-titled and on Lucky Pierre records.
I hate when one-sheets (pieces of paper with biographical/discographical/etc. information on a band sent with cds for review) are written to entertain. I'm reading the press sheet for information. If you can inform me while entertaining I'm happy, but first inform. Having said that, this press sheet was not a good introduction for me to the band. It was pretty insane and uninformative for the most part, so I wasn't actually looking forward to hearing this. But surprises do sometimes come to me in the form of review schwag.
I guess the best place then to start is the cover. It's this heavily processed photo. Awash in greens and blues, the only pieces to stop the eyes from getting lost in the colors are the stabs of light amongst the green pools. It's like a forest, but the eyes seeing this forest are so heavily, er, "medicated" it's just a wash. The name is printed off center in this font that's Everywhere these days, that slightly destroyed look? Like the name was typed with an old ribbon.
(Did I mention this band also has a former member of Sky Cries Mary? That's pretty incredible.)
The music isn't too tough to describe in broad strokes. It's all instrumental, sometimes wank-y, sometimes droning on for minutes at a time, but all with this subtle eastern feel. It makes sense with the name, Sirhan Duran must mean something in a language foreign to me. I'm not one to quickly praise instrumental music, so much of it is trite, filled with the same themes and ideas. Most seem to fall too quickly into either the super technical trap or the "simple" trap. It's a tough thing, this instrumental music. It's been said before in any number of reviews and essays and interviews about instrumental music, but the loss of a vocalist means the emotional crutch, the traditional center is gone. The emotion of your music has to come from someplace else. Some bands use a particular instrument to fill that space, allowing one sound to stand in for the singer. Sirhan Duran ignore the place of the vocalist entirely, which is nice.
The instrumentation seems pretty standard, some guitars, a bass, drums and electronics (which I'm sure include computers and synthesizers); but the songs, while not necessarily being groundbreaking compositions, steer clear of clichés. So broad strokes are all I've given, and I was right, that wasn't too tough, but it's the specifics that matter, right? The devil's in the details, as they say.
When I try to get real concrete about this band, try to focus on the particulars it's not that it falls apart, it's that my words become a blur of colors, with just a few stabs of light illuminating the colors only to show sworls, not defined lines. Since there are only five original tracks I'll go step by step. "Axon Loves Denorite" is first, this bass-heavy droning piece. The only movement in the whole thing this insistent fluttering, it's not a beat, it's just this bass pulse, forcing everything to move forward. Like a huge, eight minute, palpitating heart awash in e-bowed notes and chords, sometimes joined by a run-together synth glissando. "Back to Berlin" has this nice little beat to it. I like this track a lot too, a seemingly random melody plays over the percussion. Picking out vaguely eastern themes with a drum machine's beat and subtle synth gurgles. It's just the right length too. At the 4 minute mark I start to punch out of my reverie and less than a minute later it's over. "Fading By 909" features live drums, woohoo. It's all over now man, the party has started. Pulsing white noise starts it, and the drums soon follow. Nine minutes of bliss is what you're in for man. This is minimalism in the best way. Think Tony Conrad with Faust, Rhys Chatham, some of Sonic Youth's drone-y moments. It's this gorgeous, lulling ride with slowly changing tones and microtones, easily the best thing here. On first listen I was a little put off by the addition of live bass somewhere around the middle, but give it a few seconds and you're back in bliss mode. It's nice to know minimalism is alive and kicking.
"Electronic Guidance Counselor" starts with this incredible hip-hop feel. The snare and cymbals cut out every fifth beat or so, giving the whole thing this weird jazzy syncopation. A guitar plays a meandering melody over voices cutting in and out till halfway through everything disappears only to be replaced by an acoustic guitar and some high tones. A pretty dramatic shift right in the middle that feels way awkward until the guitar comes back playing the same meandering melody. Slowly it builds till the snare and cymbals join back for the only "post-rock" moment on the album. A nice little crescendo of beats and melody. "Removing Silence" is yet another exploration of tones. The rhythmic aspect is completely gone and the tones slowly shift and glide over each other. There's a fluttering bed of white noise buried way deep in the mix giving ears something different to grab onto every once in a while.
The remixes provide a whole new perspective on the songs. Unfortunately two out of the three new perspectives are pretty bad. The "Removing Silence" remix adds beats and melodic flutterings, making what was once a gorgeous, shifting drone into a scattered, confused sounding mess. I'm not a fan of it. The second remix ("Back to Berlin") almost sounds like a dub take on the whole thing, but the subtlety is replaced by loud, obnoxious synth tones. Again, taking something simple and beautiful and turning it into something, er, not. The last remix however is pretty nice. Once again "Back to Berlin" is the source. It's slowed down a bit and the biggest additions are the glitch-y deconstructions running behind the whole thing. The beat is dropped and instead this Mego-sounding, confused noise runs the show. The melodies are pushed WAY up front while backwards beats quietly press in for the whole track, never really breaking through though.
The remixes seem a bit much, something tacked on to make the record look longer. I'd have been happy with the original five tracks. All are complete, and in need of no tweaking. Sirhan Duran have dropped what is an incredibly good debut. I was thoroughly taken aback, especially given that horrible one-sheet.
B+
