Odd Nosdam - Level Live Wires

Odd Nosdam - Fat Hooks (Anticon. 2007)

Odd Nosdam - Level Live Wires / Anticon.

If it seems like we're closely watching the Anticon. offices, we apologize: Mansbestfriend's latest just happened to be a really excellent record and, together with Thee More Shallows, our faith in Anticon. had not necessarily been restored but more revitalized. Now we're still a long way off from this one (August 28th is the official release date), so it's likely that someone will call us out for jumping the gun... But we can't help it. As the latest from another core member of the collective, Odd Nosdam's Level Live Wires hit me in just the right way at just the right time. But while Tim Holland explained in our interview with him that he was putting together the sounds that would make a politically charged statement in Poly.sci.187, David Madson has meanwhile been crafting one of the best shoegazer albums of the year. No, really. You're going to want Level Live Wires.

But why, right? If you were in love with hip-hop and came to worship Anticon. because their beatsmiths blew away your speakers, why would you want something that effectively references late My Bloody Valentine or M83 or even Channel One more than anything remotely resembling hip-hop? The answer is that, deep beneath the swirling synthstatic fuzz of "Fat Hooks" or the droning beauty of "Burner," there still lurks the beats that helped unite Anticon. in the first place.

Less a cLOUDDEAD record and more a world that inhabits the pleasant spaces of the subconscious, the optimistic moments in your REM sleep. Interestingly, the thread that ties this record together with 2005's Burner is a track of the same name. Perhaps this track holds the key to the whole album several minutes in: An eight-track recorder and an unsettling high-pitched Ford Explorer horn juxtapose the stuttering horn that evolves into the bass line. "Burner" was one of Madson's most challenging songs, but with some help from Hood-lum Chris Adams (violin and background vocals), the song comes together as one of his greatest successes. You can still hear the Explorer burning at the end as its car alarm goes off, but this kind of subtlety only reaches you after it's all over.

His experience working with Boards of Canada, Thee More Shallows and Serena Maneesh in particular are all at the fore of a track like the effervescent "Kill Tone." If "Burner" is both the dark underside of his past efforts mixing with the driven guitar/synth splendor of Level Live Wires, then "Kill Tone" is firmly in the present. Its harp harmony is so spectacular, in fact, that it returns later in the album accompanied by some spoken-word poetry courtesy Why?'s Yoni Wolf and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. To mentally connect another dot, this one has the feeling of a lost Nine Inch Nails song from The Fragile. Maybe it's the piano. Same thing with "Up in Flames." The production didn't cost millions, but it sounds amazing in headphones and speakers alike. It's just got that feeling to it.

"Fat Hooks" is another one looking to the light of heaven for inspiration and finding the blinding rays of Kevin Shields' broken dreams for pop in the 90s instead, but this makes it no less appealing. Odd Nosdam may be the best sound collage artist in the business partly because this album doesn't sound like a sound collage at all. There's so much going on, so many layers of sound, so many of them barely noticeable, that not getting the early pressings of this release that include an EP of the sounds which helped form these songs would be daft. This is a contemporary record full of contemporary thoughts, sounds and ideas that can only be expressed properly through as few words as possible. It is a record that will move you to feel, because that's just what humans do. It's what separates us from dinosaurs and gorillas and Kraftwerk. Level Live Wires is the sound of the human experience, one hazy daydream at a time.