A Lull’s debut album Confetti starts off resembling something hazy but familiar, like what traffic might sound like if its noises tried to tune themselves like instruments. A soporific voice seeps nicely into the churning, oftentimes droning, yet harmonized nature of many songs and, like most of the sounds on this album, it oscillates between being a tool of percussion and melody. In a world where auto-tuning vocals like a sonic Black Death, the digital-ish vocal effects and rampant harmonizing on this elaborately composed album exudes appealing and sensible aesthetic.
The flavorful ingredients of this album are adventurous and diverse. There are elements of Ambient, Noise, Folk and Shoegaze all in an Experimental concoction. Each beautifully crafted song also contains complex layering of instruments and sounds, such as echoed pieces, industrial beats, fuzzy percussion and complicated harmonies. A Lull also music-ifies random sounds like breaking bottles, the crunch of garbage bags and what I think is an old ringing phone. The end of “Water & Beasts” seems to do opposite and use instruments to emulate an accidentally melodic printer rhythmically rolling out pages.
Sometimes the culmination of many layers of sound at various points in a song’s progression is only arduously digested but also quasi-orgasmic. The album is like aural confetti falling and shining all around. Some faster, beat-heavy songs like “Phem” and “Spread It All Around” resemble a similarly multifaceted group, Animal Collective. Confetti’s organically layered aspects and the dreamy ones like on “Pregnancy” give an air of talented multi-instrumentalists like Benoit Pioulard and fellow Chicagoan Andrew Bird.
Overall Confetti provides for a fantastic listen. One song melts succulently into the next, but if you really listen many subtleties of the composition and lyrics become solidified. There are motifs of blood, violence, the body, time, movement, intimacy, loneliness and ambiguous love – all epitomized in sound. At the end of listening to this album you might feel like you just woke up from an intense dream, the details of which you might lose with each moment but the sensation of which only grows stronger.
A Lull will be playing two Chicago gigs in April: a release show for Confetti on April 22nd at Schubas and another show on the 30th at Chicago Art Department.