2 out of 5

Label: VHF Records

Produced by: ILK (?)

This is not… far from work I’ve enjoyed from Richard Youngs, and there are aspects of ILK’s sound that I quite adore, but man, this is also one that just does not come together for me.

ILK is multi-everythingist Richard Youngs paired with the similarly multi-disciplined Andrew Paine. That latter ingredient perhaps encourages two sides of Youngs – his neo-folk style, mass-reverbed acoustic tracks; his experiemental, noise-based tracks – two merge somewhere between, layering and layering the melody, while interjecting with occasional bouts of squalling, proggy interplay. That sounds… pretty badass, but in the latter case, it often ends up being a rocketship to nowhere, with the recording giving the music shallow depth, which butts up against the multi-tracked vocals of the former style, making for a somewhat confused middleground that’s pretty loud, but not very distinctive. Additionally, the duo leans into a psychedelic backing for the entire album, using cymbals and swishy, warbling guitars to effect something very akin to the inbetween moments or bridges of some classic 70s prog outfits – which also sounds great, except for the decision to extend this out as drone, which still sounds totally not bad, except except the flat singing style cuts in very often, riding a straight line across all this varying noise, and certainly too verbose to be just added in to the drone pile, i.e. asking the listener to pay attention, and rather preventing immersiveness into the swell of sounds.

It may not be surprising, given all this, that my favorite moments of Canticle are instrumental; I still think the kind of loose, go-nowhere approach to the songwriting alongside the flat recording stymies the music from truly letting go, but I can also tell that it’s something I could get in to with more spins. Adding the vocals into the mix, though, makes that an impossibility – this is just a stew of things that may have worked in various other configurations, but altogether, doesn’t make much sense to my ears.