Hotel Hotel's initial existence has already had enough going for it to supply at least several art films' worth of scripts, ranging from disappearing drummers in airports to encounters with obsessed maritime adventurers. This last situation fed into the creation of the band's second album, The Sad Sea, an appropriately oceanic sounding wash of majestic guitars and drones in the band's preferred post-Mogwai/Godspeed approach to music. Beginning with the appropriately titled "From Harbour," with the gentlest of feedback tones and a low rumbling undercarriage suggesting the start of a larger voyage, The Sad Sea initially doesn't have the full feeling of what is thematically promised -- often each piece is mostly a gentle variation on what has already come beforehand. However, with the album's fourth track, "Equator in the Meantime (Black Sabbath)," the first to prominently feature drums, things take on a new intensity, and while Hotel Hotel's artistic scope is well-defined within its general parameters, there are still notable moments to be had. The inclusion of solo violin parts in the overall arrangements lends the album's best songs a queasy, stranger edge, the more so because it can so easily blend into some of the more standard guitar textures, while the band's full burst into the climactic two-part closer, "The Captain Goes Down with the Ship," covers both exultant sky-scraping surges and a final slow wash to wrap things up on a fine note. Meanwhile, if "The Shoreline Disappears" is in some respects an inevitable variation -- the primary instrument is piano, with a steady, softly descending melodic loop setting the tone -- it's still a lovely one, with the addition of distant feedback creating a lost, forlorn air.
© Ned Raggett /TiVo