Plumbiferous Media

Long Dis­tance Call­ing is a Ger­man post-rock band which began releas­ing music three years ago. Since then, they’ve put out sev­eral strong albums. Avoid the Light, which dis­plays Long Dis­tance Calling’s exper­tise with the facets of instru­men­tal music while also exper­i­ment­ing with the addi­tion of vocals, is their third.

Avoid the Light begins well, with a sub­tle, sim­ple intro speck­led with bits of intrigu­ing sound. It quickly moves into the main sec­tion, which uses a strong base­line to sup­port the pro­gres­sion of the tracks. Though the base­line is rather repet­i­tive, it still forms an excel­lent back­bone for the album, espe­cially matched with a melody which makes good use of both the instru­ments present as well as techno-like dis­tor­tion, which adds an intrigu­ing ele­ment of com­plex­ity to the music.

While the first four tracks are above-average exam­ples of post-rock, dis­tin­guished by strong instru­men­tals and an inter­est­ing pro­gres­sion, the fifth track, “The Near­ing Grave,” tops every­thing before it. Bring­ing in ethe­real vocals which effec­tively com­ple­ment the pow­er­ful instru­men­tals, “The Near­ing Grave” takes the for­mula of ear­lier tracks and fur­ther refines it, cre­at­ing an excel­lent track.

Though Avoid the Light is pop­u­lated by rel­a­tively long tracks, Long Dis­tance Call­ing has man­aged to avoid allow­ing their energy to dip near the end of long tracks, as is often the case with tracks of such length. Instead, Avoid the Light is filled with tracks which acknowl­edge and use their length expertly, to the point where it’s quite reward­ing to hear a theme progress over, for exam­ple, the 12 min­utes of “Apparitions.”

“Appari­tions,” like many post-rock tracks, starts out soft, then slowly builds by hav­ing new instru­ments enter; melodies change and even­tu­ally the track grows into quite a heavy sound. But “Appari­tions” dif­fers from these other post-rock tracks in that the sequences and melodies are repeated for long stretches of time, and noth­ing, not even the dynamic, changes from begin­ning to end of that por­tion of the music. And “Appari­tions” is not on its own in the album. Both “359” and “I Know You, Stan­ley Mil­gram!” suf­fer from this same rep­e­ti­tion, and the strong tracks are so much bet­ter than the weaker tracks because the increased atten­tion that Long Dis­tance Call­ing has paid to sub­tle dynamic dif­fer­ences is made incred­i­bly apparent.

But “Appari­tions” is also an exam­ple of what makes Avoid the Light stand out. The only sound car­ry­ing the track for the first thirty sec­onds is purely syn­thetic. Over­all, even while ensur­ing that every other instru­ment: gui­tar, bass, drums, and the rare sam­ples and vocals, is incred­i­bly pow­er­ful on its own, Long Dis­tance Call­ing does a great job of includ­ing the synth, not only in the back­ground, but in the fore­ground of its sound.

Even with occa­sion­ally heavy amounts of rep­e­ti­tion, Long Dis­tance Call­ing has pro­duced an incred­i­bly diverse musi­cal album. There is a lit­tle of some­thing for every­one on Avoid the Light, punk, acoustic, indie, disco, and hard-rock fans included. While Avoid the Light is not with­out its flaws, and while the album could have ben­e­fited from slightly more atten­tion to the small details, Long Dis­tance Call­ing has pro­duced a very strong, cre­ative album.

This post is tagged 80-89, Long Distance Calling