Bodies Of Water "Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink"
By Jared Brownell
Monday. Jul 23, 11:14 AM
Energetic, boisterous, and gleeful.

Bodies Of Water have an innate sense of how to balance the energetic and boisterous with the lulls and pianissimos. Drawing from a variety of sources and decades, the most contemporary being The Arcade Fire and The Polyphonic Spree, each song here is a microcosm of the album as a whole, embodying a range of emotions and tempos that keep you engaged throughout the entire album. The vocals are not just regulated to singing lyrics: they get a lot of mileage out of having it mimic or even take the place of a moaning guitar or poppy keyboard. The voice becomes yet another instrument to produce a sound.

Fragile solo verses and punchy call-and-responses swell into a chorus the size of a small army. This quartet becomes a cacophony of sounds by hitting every possible harmonious and dissident note on the scale. Most of the vocals fall into the background except for one of the female voices. Her voice draws much attention to itself in the crowd. While most of them are singing versus in a focused harmony, she will come along with an out of key, sharp, piercing voice dirtying everything up, and it’s simply fantastic. Fantastic as in the way Kyp Malone's falsetto complements the rest of TV On The Radio.

"It is Familiar" brings you back to your 5th grade music class by reacquainting you with rounds, then completely distorting it. The verse starts off as one but quickly delaminates into separate voices repeating and echoing the lead. All voices quickly congeal again to mark the end of the verse, so throughout the song there is a focusing and spreading of vocals and a device to mark time and progression. They do this on many of their songs, which is a good thing since it blurs the boundary between one track and the next.

Most bands tend to compartmentalize their music, cleanly and efficiently separating different musical themes into different tracks, not at all unlike a historian distilling things down to their basic essence for ease in cataloging and understanding. Bodies Of Water subvert this very effectively by changing mood and tempo several times throughout a single song, making it difficult to realize when one begins or ends. It's not until about halfway through the next track that you get the sneaking suspicion that it might be a different song.

Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink is easy to lose yourself in, what with the all-out vocal assaults, pauses, solo reflections, a bit of dialogue, and the re-ensuing vocal assault. They finally wrap it up with "We Are Co-existors," where all the voices come back into balance, drenching you with their exuberant soul. All too often, records are produced as a collective set of stand alone tracks that have little or nothing to do with each other (or they all sound the same). Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink, on the other hand, as a cohesive composition would not be out of place up there with The Dark Side of the Moon and OK Computer.
www.bodiesofwater.net

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Jared Brownell

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