4 out of 5

Produced by: Ticonderoga?

Label: 54’40 or Fight!

Ticonderoga’s first album on 54’40 fit in well with the label’s folk-touched indie acts, and added – through the vocalist’s lazy drawl and the group’s loosely rocking compositions – tonal reminders of Pavement.  Ah, but fear not: I’m not a big Pavement fan, but I do like Ticonderoga.  The off-putting too-cool-for-school vibe of Stephen Malkmus’ lyrics and delivery never quite allowed me to sidle up to the band, despite the undeniable memorability of certain tracks and albums; Ticonderoga has its barriers, but the laid back sensibility seems borne more of the wandering mindset of dreamers as opposed to slackers, and I never get the sense that any of their various modes are ironically ordained  – organic is very much the name of the game.

And they push it on their second album, The Heilig-Levine LP, to the extent that that organic flow starts to feel improvised.  As it spits out fantastically ramshackle tracks like opener Fucking Around, or the aggressive ebb and flow of its follow up Centipede, this is initially exciting, fulfilling a promise of inspiration that, sticking with the Pavement ragging, that club, for me, never fulfilled.  But then The H-L LP seems to get lost in the process of building its own path, as the disc’s middle stubbornly refuses to cut loose as before, culminating in how Country Mouse repurposes the first track’s riff for a song three times the length and without any climaxes.  The concluding tracks then revel in a puzzling sincerity – emotions feel more straight-forward – that doesn’t feel satisfying after that middle mire.

And yet, something about the album lingers.  For me, it continued to linger through several listens…  Heilig-Levine is an incredibly dense album, and to be honest, I’m not sure I can make the case that its worth the time to penetrate its listen puzzles.  But the fortunate result of my relistens was that investment of time, and once the album clicked, it flowered.  That murky mid-section is actually surprisingly strong: What feels like a lack of peaks is the group adhering to more typical song structure than the way the album starts, culminating in a brilliantly subdued orchestral conclusion on that Mouse track, which gives way to the even more stripped down sound of the last few tracks.  This structure doesn’t feel accidental, either, with two brief instrumental interludes bracketing the album’s sections.

It is noteworthy that Ticonderoga do follow a type of patchwork composition style, something that likely makes due with input from all the band members, and at a passing listen this makes a lot of the tracks feel fractured – hence the improvisation comment – with songs haltingly midway through to shift moods.  But just like that lingering feeling, something thematic hangs between those moods, and the deeper you dive, the less fractured and more compelling and cutting it becomes.

The first Google result for Heilig-Levine: “Heilig-Levine is a historic rehabilitation project that combines four neighboring commercial buildings into one mixed-use structure.”  Hm.