2 out of 5

Label: Souterrain Transmissions

Produced by: All the Saints

My eyes drift over the photo-collage artwork of All The Saints’ Intro To Fractions’ liner notes and cover and can’t really focus on anything; I scan the back cover’s wall of text a few times before absorbing any information in terms of song titles, or the production team. This is indicative of my listening experience, which I approached through a couple different formats (digital, CD) and over a couple mediums (speakers, headphones), but couldn’t much come to a settled feeling about the album, much less any given song. And this settled in to a bit of frustration.

Openly indebted to loudmakers and shoegazers like My Bloody Valentine, AtS kind of take an all-hands-on approach to Wall of Sound, which… should be appropriate, but a lack of songwriting focus prevents the majority of the listen from crossing a threshold from interesting to immersive, and an odd tendency to mix / record everything into the mid-register limits the impact of its better moments.

Monotone like Atombombpocketknife, and with some swoozy grooves that remind me of Autolux, Saints are certainly capable of crafting their own spin on the scene, which works best when their busyness has some balance – the reverbed Host; the slowburn title track; the bass-forward Buster – or when they lean all-in to something that effects drone, like opener Half Red, Half Why’s mesmeric blast of musical patter. But even on the majority of these efforts, the tracks often hit a wall: Half Red feels like an opener for something that never arrives (either in terms of within the song or in the followup Poly Daughters), and Intro To Fractions’ mix just completely underwhelms its climax. Elsewhere, the group goes for that all-in approach but tries to craft poppier or punkier tracks out of it, and the melodies are too wandering to land, or again kind of dulled by the mix. The latter may be a way of masking the lack of reach in the vocals, but ABPK is a great example of how that can still work (though even when they get the formula wrong, their songcraft is a bit sharper).

While Fractions is definitely a tolerable disc, and merits some good, head-bobby beats and impressive overload at points, those successes are what ultimately work against it: because they’re fleeting, it draws more attention to what’s not working, making it a test of my patience when I’m trying to give it attention.