A dark musical undercurrent can often turn out to be a band’s means to its own end. It’s a difficult theme to sustain over a challenging album, let alone an entire career. A comic book sensibility can creep in. The rare birds are those that can effectively navigate the uncharted netherworld between dusk and dawn.
On An Index Of Birds, studio project Carta navigates often bleak, chilling musical landscapes with blessed acumen. On “Building Bridges,” the album’s second track (its first “song focused” track after the opener, “Alfred M”), they unite frightening vocals (a tale of mass murder and its cover up) with churning undercurrents of bass that reappear throughout the thirteen tracks. Building bridges – but to what? One wonders, sometimes aloud as the song’s desperation mounts.
The album’s direction seems to be that of fracture and recovery, motifs pieced together as though exhumed from some wreckage. “The Likeness Is Undeniable” feels like it was reassembled from a sunken ocean liner. Voices appear distinctly in the distance then vanish; ambience shifts, settles and then shakes. What makes Carta’s delivery of An Index Of Birds so successful is that it’s always working on two levels: as neo-Gothic, song based writing, and again as complex, multi-faceted instrumentation. That line may be gray to some extent, but here it allows the macabre vocals to fester in the listener’s imagination. No one is pounding the theme of threat over your head.
When “Sidereal” happens (maybe the brooding album’s best track) it’s a cold, blunt reprieve. Although fittingly dank, it feels miles away from “Building Bridges” a place the listener naturally wanted to be. |