WE DREW LIGHTNING***image1***
Swimming with Orange
High Mayhem
We Drew Lightning's debut album,
Swimming with Orange
, is an ambitious project. Its dark, weighted sounds rise and carve with a cavalcade of instruments and explorations. The sound, through slopes and curves, is explosively restrained.
Lightning enters a territory of music that works against derivative familiarity. There are no consistent melodies, bridges or hooks to stumble upon. This is where Lightning sinks its own battleship. In the quest to push its own boundaries, the album compartmentalizes itself with a genre of post-punk/electronic and experimental music that has long left the harbor, circa early '90s.
The post-punk era allowed for open-ended poetic license of postmodern thought, in which artistic boundaries didn't seem to exist and experimentation ruled. But in the words of American poet Wallace Stevens, "The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully." And, like a sequence poem broken into 10 songs, the album's long vocal wisps, distorted guitars, drums, cello, electronics and banjo are enthusiastic, but forced and unbalanced.
Orange
's adventurous spirit is lamentably quashed by muffled sound and unintelligible vocals.
Swimming with Orange
inches past its flaws, but once it grabs your attention, the struggle begins to maintain the listener's focus.
