Plumbiferous Media

Remind Me Where the Light Is is the sec­ond full-length album from LA indie group Great North­ern, fol­low­ing their mod­er­ately well-received 2007 debut album, Trad­ing Twi­light for Day­light. Though Remind Me Where the Light Is demon­strates many of the same musi­cal traits as Trad­ing Twi­light for Day­light, Great North­ern has failed to exe­cute them in as suc­cess­ful a man­ner on their newest album.

Remind Me Where the Light Is cer­tainly suf­fers from sub­stan­tial flaws, but in some cases the same issues which impair the album as a whole cre­ate the most tol­er­a­ble parts of the album. The rep­e­ti­tion which becomes overused later in the album is used to some­what sat­is­fac­tory effect on sev­eral early tracks, most notably on the first, “Story,” in which the sta­tic musi­cal pat­terns and lyri­cal lines are used to cre­ate a pass­able base­line for the track, though it is merely solid rather than gen­uinely interesting.

Even if the lyrics of Remind Me Where the Light Is had been incred­i­bly pro­found, the effect would have been lost through the con­stant rep­e­ti­tion. Per­haps it’s good then that the lyrics are nei­ther worse nor bet­ter than mediocre - any­thing bet­ter would have been wasted and any­thing worse painful. As it is, Great Northern’s for­get­table lines about “the weight of the world” and fin­gers don’t have any espe­cially last­ing effect on the album as a whole. Per­haps that’s the best that could be said about them, given how many other aspects of Remind Me Where the Light Is detract from the album.

Rep­e­ti­tion (in note sequences, larger phrases, instru­ments, vocal phrases, lyrics, and in nearly every other name­able ele­ment as well) is absolutely the name of the game for Great North­ern on Remind Me Where the Light Is. And quite sim­ply, while some of the tracks use rep­e­ti­tion to mid­dling suc­cess, most of the album sim­ply falls apart. The rea­son that tracks like “Houses” actu­ally sound decent is because while the instru­ments are doing lit­tle to sup­port the track (though more than on most other tracks) the quite strong vocals and upbeat rhythm of the track man­age to make it last at least most of the way through its fourth minute.

What this means, of course, is that once the strong vocals are removed around “Stop” (the fifth track), the album quickly becomes fairly dif­fi­cult to lis­ten to, and not only because the rep­e­ti­tion becomes over­whelm­ing; the album addi­tion­ally loses a sep­a­rate musi­cal qual­ity that might not have been rec­og­nized if it hadn’t gone miss­ing. The ear­lier tracks actu­ally had quite inter­est­ing har­monies, and made good use of stray­ing in and out of uni­son, although the effects were repeated so many times that they quickly grew some­what dull, whereas the later tracks are, if any­thing, char­ac­ter­ized by being just a bit shrill on occasion.

Not only is each track on Remind Me Where the Light Is highly repet­i­tive, but the album as a whole is ter­ri­bly repet­i­tive. A major­ity of the tracks on the album are in nearly the same tempo, and the ones that aren’t sound like the rest of the album for sep­a­rate rea­sons. In fact, the only track that really sticks out is “33,” and it unfor­tu­nately sticks out like a sore thumb, as it nei­ther sounds decent on its own, nor has any strained con­nec­tion what­so­ever to the rest of the album. While there are some redeem­ing qual­i­ties in Remind Me Where the Light Is, and a few fairly decent tracks, the album as a whole remains fairly boring.

This post is tagged 20-29, Great Northern