Empty the Bones of You

The cover of Chris Clark's last album, 2001's celebrated Clarence Park, depicted a crystalline winterland, populated by a young boy in a knit hood. In contrast, the cover of this year's Empty the Bones of You is a pale figure thrust into a nightmarish spiral of skulls, spears, and oblivion. I'm wagering that Chris has been to a couple of funerals in the last two years.

While, contrary to what my first paragraph might suggest, I did actually listen to this album, the distinction is instructive. Clark's last album, while not a bad album by any means, struck many as standard-fare Warp, the type of guy you hear on a comp and then attribute to some better known artist. And while the songs were better Aphex/Squarepusher tracks than the ones on either Drukqs and Go Plastic, they were still just Aphex/Squarepusher songs. The sole innovation was Clark's segregation of moods; with a few exceptions, there were happy songs and sad songs, with very little in between. It was classic Warp without the ambiguity, a technically virtuoso performance channeling mediocrity.

On the new album, however, Clark gains some unique ground. "Indigo Optimos" opens with a minimal Detroit techno beat, then gets trounced by some jarring cuts. Rather than tediously layering one audio track on another and then peeling them off slowly at the end, he'll simultaneously put on three or four tracks for a bar, then get rid of them all at once, only to sample the same passage later in the song. The result is haunting, and leagues more accomplished than anything on his debut. On "Early Mass," a music box gets stuck on a groove, grows increasingly metallic, and then gradually fades away until only a shell of the initial sound remains-- the erosive gives way to the evocative. The sound is literally haunted. Later, the apparition circumnavigates the original music box sample and, until "Tyre" comes along and drops the instrument into the street, the sound perfectly balances infantile calm and sophisticated mourning.

Most songs seem on the brink of collapsing completely. Each struggles to get its melody out, but is threatened by static, loops, and that form of antagonistic buzzing that can only be described as Basic Channel. "Holiday as Brutality" features a jazzy synth absorbed by distortion until the song starts over again on a lighter frequency. The melody here is weathered, but intact. The phenomenal "Gravel (Obliterated)" seems to rest on a dilapidated suspension bridge-- eventually the ropes fray, the planks fall, and the entire song just sort of drops into a static that continues into "Gob Coitus", which restructures the white noise and melody into a more subterranean atmosphere.

The album's second half flounders a bit with well-executed, but not particularly memorable pieces ("Farewell Track", "Betty"). What must have been intended as the centerpiece, the six-minute "Wolf", is a surprisingly traditional "epic hip-hop" instrumental (think DJ Shadow) and not nearly as impressive as the next shorter track, "Slow Spines", a potpourri of harp, grated cheese, robot handclaps, and whistling. While Chris Clark has found his voice on this album and will, in all likelihood, become a household name on par with the Warp flagships, he hasn't yet recorded his masterpiece. Still, there's an ambition in this stuff that was absent in Clarence Park-- one that will surely make this Best Promising Sophomore Album sometime in the near future.