After eight years of work,
Landing have turned into something of a free-flowing enterprise, where each album or release is almost like a new chapter in a book. It's something captured as well in their album artwork, as if they were snapshots in a continuing journey in some strange landscape. Key to all this working, though, is constantly fine music, and once again
Landing deliver on the excellent
Brocade. Now fully expanded to a quintet with the inclusion of
Peter Baumann, on
Brocade Landing balance out newer kinds of gentle tension in arrangements and performances while still maintaining the overall glow and glaze from their earliest days. Without being either the tasteful dead end of "post-rock" as it ended up or the dramatic-to-a-fault approach of
Godspeed You Black Emperor! and their many descendants, the band's music here suggests stateliness and progress -- consider the inspirational rise of the opening song, "Loft," where a crisp, clinical rhythm like a mutated
Kraftwerk is matched with keyboard swells and intertwined, liquid guitar melodies. From there,
Brocade continues in presenting songs that are soothing but never sappy, tinged with melancholia but never less than warm, and captivating in their own particular way.
Adrienne Snow's understated vocals softly wend their occasional way through the mix -- when she first appears on "Yon," the effect is downright subliminal -- while "How to Be Clear" features
Aaron Snow adding a distanced performance over a suddenly motoriked-up performance, featuring the guitars at their most blasting. The whole album is not of a piece, though, with "Spiral Arms" getting its emphasis and rhythm via the combination of guitar lines rather than drums, though bass softly underpins the song while finger cymbals add a further mysterious touch, while the beatless (but not arrhythmic) "Music for Three Synthesizers" is just that.