Rafael Anton Irisarri’s first album as
the Sight Below was titled after a
My Bloody Valentine EP. Two of its songs happened to share titles with songs by
the Verve and
Ride. The connection between
It All Falls Apart and shoegaze runs deeper:
Simon Scott, who played drums in
the Charlottes and
Slowdive, provides “guitars, treatments, and electronics” on three songs, co-writing and co-producing two of them with the Pacific Northwest producer. Not merely another album of impeccably made ambient thump-and-drone,
It All Falls Apart improves upon the exceptional debut in that it is more evocative and less insular, with a sense of openness that is far more comforting than alienating. Only two songs -- back to back, in the middle of the sequence -- carry that muffled
Gas-eous pulse-rhythm heard on
Glider, and even those are elegantly downcast, graced with layers of deceptively contrasting guitar-generated drones that can create states of anxious bliss and becalmed terror (to such an affecting extent that
Irisarri could have justifiably swiped the title of
the Verve's first album,
A Storm in Heaven). A slow-motion, almost motionless, rendering of
Joy Division's “New Dawn Fades,” featuring pitched-down-sounding vocals from
Jesy Fortino (
Tiny Vipers), resembles a
Velvet Underground &
Nico ballad heard through wind-tunnel squall. “A change of speed, a change of style” takes on a literal meaning here.