By paraphrasing a phrase from one of The Smiths songs "Oh California, so much to answers for", I want to say that Californians have had big role to answer to some important questions in the developing process of avant-garde music in the past. It is hard to overestimate the role of such band like The Residents, Sparks, Big City Orchestra, Negativland, Cromagnon, and Estradasphere, if to show up only some names among others.
Clayton McEvoy comes from California, being grew up in the vast expanse of concrete and desert. He is a modern guy, creating his soundscape from the glorious traditions of shoegaze, drone, minimal music, and ambient. His music is consisting of Slowdive`s Pygmalion-era experiments, La Monte Young`s and Angus MacLise`s cyclic and pulsating drones, and sharing a bit similarities with the guitar-driven ambient contemporaries such as Stars Of The Lid and Windy & Carl, or a bit earlier acts such as Labradford and Beautiful Machine.
I doesn`t matter how should we view upon Lamenter, a follow-up to his debut album Cradlesongs (released under Hidden Shoal), as avant-garde, or vanguardism in itself, just abandoning an obsession to draw out an abovementioned row regarding cutting edge music from California. Although the frontier between bad taste and good taste is often very fragile within the genres of ambient music just because of its huge (over)explotation and the conceptual finiteness of the genre the present album is on the right side yet. Some minor even often invisible details being on this album play very crucial part in the first place. For instance, those haunting even outwards feelings pursuing undercurrents passing through such tracks as Bleeding Riverbed, and Kinski for Halloween helping with to create genuinely powerful manifestations nowadays. Mostly Clayton McEvoy`s music is sliding and slipping uphill and downhill on foggy soundscapes herein.
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8.0
