Souled American
Frozen

If a band decided to hold a concert in a bar under the sea, it would hardly sound like the Belgians dEUS. The sound waves transmitted through a dense medium like water would likely muffle, slow down, and distort the sounds until making any band an imitation of the Souled American.

However, it's difficult to think that the imitation would be even comparable in terms of intensity, compositional quality, richness, and subtlety of tone. This is because the songs of Souled American were not first written and then subjected to a cosmetic or diffraction through this aquatic distorting lens to make them "interesting" or "strange."

The songs of "Frozen" are as they are by virtue of the compositional process that generated them: the three main musicians responsible for the project support themselves with other jobs, and their day off does not coincide. They make a virtue of necessity and devise a method that turns an obstacle into a creative spark. Each of them goes to the studio weekly in solitude and adds sound details to a minimal starting track. They are like cautious brushstrokes. Clusters of notes played with the necessity not to rush forward, to make their contribution, their addition to the canvas an actual tool of dialogue with the other musicians. The album grows over two years. Two years in which this slow-motion race gives life to an unending texture like Penelope's tapestry, because the musicians do not just layer and add sounds, but most of the time they subtract, retrace their steps. And indeed, upon listening, Frozen does not sound like a wall of overdubbed sounds, but rather like the dense and nervous silence that hovers between three musicians in telepathic dialogue.

The shared ground, which allows for telepathy, is memory, tradition, the guitar twang of country, or the three-finger picking, a typical technique of banjo players. But the frozen compositional progress translates into distorted sound. The musicians seem to bend over the instruments in a suffering hand-to-hand where every note is savored in drops of sound extracted like sap from the guitar and bass strings.

Listen to believe the cavernous depth of the latter in the track that opens and gives the album its title. Or the harmonica that in the thoughtful suspensions of "Two of you" takes on the appearance of a bellowing siren in a port of fogs. Yet, despite this inherent slowdown, the tracks of Frozen present an unusual variety of cadences and rhythms. Band-like progression in "Downblossom", catatonic and almost bluesy in "Heyman", gospel in "Better who". Slowness and coldness are discovered to be vast territories all to be charted.

The exploration ends with a return home. And home, in the last track entitled "Heyday", is an original piece so classic and crafted that it could be a traditional, played with a convinced adherence to past stylistic features. Not a sterile rite, but, thanks to the regenerative immersion in the experimentation of the previous tracks, a ritual once again revitalized. Time, having found its roots, can flow again. The thaw heralds a new dawn.

It is therefore natural, rather than turning to investigate these roots (although it seems essential to arrive at Frozen starting from the indefinite era of traditionals, crossing the bridge of Ry Cooder's Paris Texas), to question the shadows that this record managed to cast on its immediate future.

Try then to listen to the first track and then immerse yourself in the track Eureka by Jim O'Rourke... the astonished slowness with which voice and guitar savor the new melodic openings he was about to embrace with that album, after years of frozen and wonderful experiments with Gastr del Sol, is imbued with the sound of Chris Grigoroff's voice and all the sonorities of Frozen...and yes, if you take a look at the rare interviews O'Rourke gave in 1994, freshly released, Frozen always figures among the preferences he expresses.