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Longtime favorites of the Chippewa Valley Halloween, Alaska recently released All Night the Calls Came In. The album now has the full fall season to incubate in our i-pods. It will spend these first few months, so critical to an album’s maturation as a social artifact, during a time of seasonal change. All Night the Calls Came In represents such a change in the band’s sound.
Halloween, Alaska has always been good to this geographical area, making appearances with seasonal regularity. They always deliver high quality, high intensity shows that carried by Diers’ impassioned vocal delivery and the masterful drumming of Dave King (also the drummer for Happy Apple, The Bad Plus, etc.) All these years their sound hasn’t lacked emotional immediacy: their music has slapped me around more than a few times, even held me up by the ankles and given me a thorough shaking once or twice. But there is a sense of urgency present on this new record the ups the ante on previous albums.
For one thing, the songs are shorter. “Analogue” is the only song that clocks in over five minutes and the last half of the track is outro. The majority of the songs run under four minutes. In addition to their brevity the songs are texturally stripped down so that the band veers toward a straight-ahead rock style instead of the deep- grooving ambient R & B that dominated their previous sound. “You Are Not Well” juxtaposes these two styles: the verse is laid out with broad enveloping textures and a gentle electronic beat that induces the listener to a slow, dreamy sway – like being lowered into a dark sea of softly rocking water. The chorus breaks this calm surface with a cymbal crash that sucks out the ambience and shrinks the sound down to just vocals over the distorted hum of a single sustained guitar chord. The dark sea dissipates and exposes a collection of raw nerves.
That’s the change this album represents to Halloween’s sound. It is raw emotion rendered without the walls of wet sound to lubricate the hinges, no slow grooves to grease the edges. Listen to the hot dry fuzz of the bass on “Analogue.” Listen to the barely contained energy of Diers’ vocals on 3:1. Listen to the unsettling harmonic progression to the chorus of “More to Come.”
There’s no lull to sink into with this record. Entrancing beats don’t appear for too long before something perturbs the pattern. The music is constant stimulation. It is edge of your seat content. I like the new Halloween, Alaska.
-Caleb Price, October 2011
The LP released by Amble Down is available in Eau Claire at Revival Records and Volume One’s Local Store. The Instrumental version of the album is also now available for free download at ambledown.com.
