The Sun - Fridge

The Sun

Fridge
Temporary Residence.

SCQ Rating: 69%

There are maybe a handful of records released within a given year that I’ll make a priority to give full attention to on first listen. By full attention, I mean sitting on my parkay floor in front of the stereo, staring at its LCD screen and the album’s liner notes, with no one home and the phone off the hook. 2007 was a busy year for favourite bands releasing records, but even so, a new Fridge album (the first since 2001) deserved special attention. Their previous album, Happiness, had become one of my favourite all-time records, and the solo work by band members Kieran Hebden (of Four Tet) and Adem Ilhan (of Adem) had kept me contently occupied in the meantime. So between eager anticipation and careful fear of overhyping, I turned off all the lights, got loaded, and pressed play.

The Sun kicks off with its title track and ‘Clocks’; a duo that present the most immediately apparent change in Fridge’s songs: that being a much smaller range of instruments used. Their opener is drummer Sam Jeffer’s exercising his elastic sense of percussion, which combined with some light noise and a distant woodwind, remains fairly innocuous. ‘The Sun’s failure to develop into anything worth hearing twice is luckily chased down by its attached older brother, ‘Clocks’, which gives far more evidence of being planned, written and worked at. The guitar lines, though hardly original, are addictive and as they repeatedly climb then falter, a whirlwind of xylophone meets percussion for an early album highlight.

Just when Fridge are starting to sound like your average post-rock band, ‘Our Place In This’ falls into my lap with the same electronic rustiness that pervaded Happiness; a lull that exudes beauty by spinning its wheels and just existing between more bombastic tracks. Likewise, ‘Oram’ develops from a hopeless wash of drum-spasms to one of Four Tet’s second cousins, unraveling a tight melody before caving into drum-work again. These tracks keep the album unpredictable, but it’s a heavy burden when a track as cringe-worthy as ‘Eyelids’ (an awkward guitar riff, bludgeoned to death for 2+ minutes) is supposedly the album’s lead single. The album rebounds in its close, with ‘Lost Time’ featuring voices (!!!!!) wordlessly singing over a haunted guitar line to great effect. As most post-rock songs tend to do, it builds into a blistering anthem of distorted guitar, utterly dramatic and predictable, but it’s also easily the best song they’ve recorded in six years. Fridge are a band of many talents, and while they often succumb to writing paint-by-number post-rock songs on The Sun, they’re too eclectic to actually make it boring. On the other hand, for a band of such incredible musicians to reconvene after six years and drop an album as careless and mediocre as this one is, any fan must be at least partially disappointed.

It isn’t until The Sun ends that I finally decode its cover art; an x-ray of one’s drum-kit, filled with all the percussive add-ons one might need to record a very drum-oriented record. And maybe this was the band’s ambition from the get-go. Beyond the programmed beats of ‘Comets’, Fridge have fully distanced themselves from the loops and tinkering that made Happiness so enlightening. Let’s hope that the boys in Fridge aren’t grounded for good.