Keyboard Choir - Mizen Head to Gascanane Sound

Debut albums are tricky. Sometimes the music is ripe. But more often than not it’s still ripening, and debuts can serve as a testing ground for ideas that sounded better in theory than they do in practice. Mizen Head to Gascanane Sound is one of those albums. It operates under the electronic sextet’s initial edict: “to create live music with the turbulence and dynamics of ‘traditional’ ensemble performance using purely electronic sound sources.” The result lingers somewhere between the IDM of Aphex Twin and the post-rock density of Mogwai, but never really settles anywhere, which in this case seems to be symptomatic of ambivalence. Keyboard Choir tend to over-saturate their harmonies with layers and miscellaneous sounds/samples that don’t rhythmically push the tracks forward. The crystalline “Macondo,” however, does manage to escape redundancy, and its handle on rhythmic and tonal subtleties serves as a promising blueprint for things to come. [Jorge Marticorena]