4 out of 5

Label: Expert Work Records

Produced by: Twenty One Trillion (recorded by)

It’s very clear what happened here: the two members of instrumental act Twenty One Trillion recorded their music, then traveled to the future to read my somewhat underwhelmed review of their initial set, 21,000,000,000,000, then traveled back to the past to select a curated set of four songs that would almost exactly address my underwhelment, so by the time I listened to 18 17 16 15, I could say – “Wow. They nailed it.”

Drums; guitars; electronics; previously this had been used for a collection of dense but low-key tunes – akin to early 00s Thrill Jockey grooves. Some krautrock drive filtered through, but the music never quite zeroed in on being immersive enough as drone or defined enough as instrumentals to really grab me, even if it could be conceptually interesting.

If I’m interpreting the media copy for this EP correctly, bandmembers Todd Ramsey and Justin Nardy had written a fair amount of tracks up front, then would select them (and record them) for each release, allowing for a true sense of stylistic curation. So for this, they rather purposefully selected a rawer, more math-rocky set, a sister release to their second full-length.

Yes, I’m bias / more partial to such math-rockiness, but I’d argue that the directness tightened up the songwriting as well, making the use of layering more effective, and giving (most of) the songs clearer trajectories; again, I just felt the initial set wasn’t enough of anything – it wasn’t chaotic enough; or loud enough; or immersive enough; etc. That’s entirely corrected here.

The basis is still a sense of krautrock momentum, especially Turing Machine’s brand of that. But we also get some Dianogah bouncey pop melodies threaded in, providing for some classic instrumental rock quiet-loud dynamics. However, what I love about this is how it does “prove” the Twenty One Trillion sound, which is reliant on the aforementioned layering: you’ll hear waves and waves of guitar and drums, vaguely hitting the same rhythms, but also pursuing slightly different tangents. Certain tracks just keep upping the ante on this throughout, adding more and more layers – such as opener 18 – whereas elsewhere we occasionally peel back and streamline to a clear beat / riff before building back up again. At the same time, this approach tends to defeat the emergence of any singular memorable moment, and that’s slightly disappointing given we’re dealing with an EPs runtime; this would’ve / could’ve been an effective approach extended to full length – giving us time to fully sink in to the open-ended nature.

But I don’t want to protest too much: the conceptual promise of this group was clarified by dropping all the smoothed edges and letting the rough stuff show. I accept this may not be the duo’s overall desired sound, and the more crafted, produced style of the first LP is in fact the aim, so I appreciate getting this glance at what I’d consider the groundwork of that style, and perhaps it’ll help me better appreciate the glossier stuff.