Alt-J
An Awesome Wave

Take “Tesselate” for example, that dirty piano, the obsessive beat and the suspended and clean guitar textures, like a riverbed flowing between sinuous rapids and calm inlets, where you find perfect landings to stop and listen to the sirens' song. Maybe you turn around and carefully observe where you are coming from and you risk staying still between the force that pushes you to go back to better observe such beauty and the one that instead forces you to move forward to discover what the evolving tracks have in store for you.

For a couple of months, this bright diamond was there, subdued, occasionally a distracted listen, a couple of times a more attentive ear had caught that there was something interesting underneath; but it was only in the last week that the chest swung open and revealed the treasure it contains.

It sounds spectacular, first of all, and this is always a noteworthy added value. Ideas gush from every corner and create that fundamental chaos for active use, because there is no time to get bored here, indeed it is surprising how quickly everything slides and wedges between the voids. 

At first, it seems excessive in its self-aware mirroring, but then you realize in an instant that you are unconsciously immersed in an oddly serene, almost carefree atmosphere, and for once you let yourself be captivated and think of nothing else.

Sometimes it seems provocative in its desire to be challenging for brief and intense moments, which like in a subliminal message create anticipation and greater enjoyment waiting for the melodies that crumple you up with the same simplicity of a piece of aluminum foil. 

It is a succession of moments, vocal refinements and harmonizations, that build a geometrically perfect web. The ease with which it transitions from a choir of alpine gathering to a guitar interweaving worthy of the most inspired Radiohead is disarming; but the sense of bewilderment and disorientation lasts for the space of one of the three interludes, then maybe you find yourself catapulted once again into that whirlwind of stop&go named “Breezeblocks”  and you can only be amazed by the sense of mania for details that oozes from every single groove.

It is a work of questions and answers, because everything makes sense in here, that sense of relief that finds its completeness in the two concluding jewels that like a sort of pagan ritual tame the fire that can burn with such vigor only around a milestone. It grows rapidly with listening and it is inevitable that it is so, because the quantity of elements to delve into, understand, and love is gigantic and every time you discover new ones.

Joe Newman's voice is yet another perfect deceit of an album that seems to never take itself seriously, but leaves the intense aftertaste of a vintage wine, one of those that if you let breathe a bit of oxygen explode in all their intense and intoxicating splendor. 

Things like this, in my opinion, the discontinuous and supersonic '00s did not offer much and it is sublime to get lost among the bucolic notes of an album that looks at metropolises with a distant and detached eye, so much that it seems out of time, neither past, nor present, nor future, but a liquid substance that seems to never be able to abandon you.