Following on very much in the style established on their previous album Alone In The Bright Lights Of A Shattered Life, this new set from Library Tapes is outstandingly bleak, minimal and intimate. I imagine that Library Tapes’ David Wenngren and Per Jardsell have never heard the theme from Oliver Postgate’s Bagpuss, but the twelve tracks here share its childlike, eerie sense of atmospherics, of loss and of glimmers of hope.

In terms of developing the musical themes from the first album, there is nothing revolutionary or particularly new at work here – both albums are made up of brief glimpses of melody; circular, echoing piano lines laid simply and effectively over a variety of scratchy, time-worn found sounds. But as part of a continuing meditation on the purity of melody, it’s hard not to be affected by these scribbles of music. At worst, the tracks pass by and leave me with nothing more than a melody hanging in my mind. At best – on the sinister, piano-less swells of sound of ‘Departures (Burning Saints For Your Own Sins)’ for example, sounding like an offcut from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume Two, and the beautifully chilly ‘Feelings For Something Lost (pt. 2)’, Library Tapes are almost unbearably heartbreaking and effective.

This is true winter music in the same way that Rachel’s and Hood are winter music – lonely, emotional sounds that reverberate deep within. I don’t know what’s in the water at Library Tapes HQ, but it brings out some of the most honest and heartfelt, yet simple, music I’ve heard in some time.

Library Tapes
Resonant

Posted: 11|6|06 at 8:14 pm. Filed under: record reviews.
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