The Drift
Memory Drawings

What I am gradually learning, year after year, listen after listen, album by album, is that elegance cannot be bought, with no currency, at any price. Let's get that straight. Sure, one can always arm oneself with a portable cart, shop for personality, raid shop windows with pseudo-thoughts on sale, queue up at the riff megastores to snag the offer of the month, or dress in the popular intellectualism so common and banal nowadays. One might even succeed in making people believe they have enough (other people's) ideas to satisfy a couple of thousand people at a time, only to then explode — as is only right — into nothingness. But elegance, no. All things being equal, indisputably, even the most artificial and carefully crafted walls of cerebralism reveal themselves, inconclusive, for what they are. There are those who possess it, and those who do not: it's not something to be learned along the way. The difference between refining and sophisticating might seem minimal only from a purely graphical perspective.

It is not my intention to unfurl yet another, pedantic catalog of artists blessed with the gift. One group is enough for me, the Drift. Four young men from San Francisco, dealing with guitar, drums, trumpet, and double bass, who are back for a second round with "Memory Drawings." If you've already understood what it's about, you might not grasp its scope because, being long a tribute to Karate or Long Fin Killie, the jazz/post-rock showcased in these seven tracks is the most dreamlike, lunar, and ivory sound that could be heard in years. Very long songs, almost all over nine minutes, with one ("Lands End") nearly reaching eleven, yet "monolithic" is one of the very last adjectives I would use to describe this type of sound, serene and calm in its flow along a road of pure, desert, ecstatic chromatic emotion. An element, just to put the cherry on top, that nips all unnecessary solipsism: even the smallest passage is steeped in vibrant tension, a fuse about to explode but, in reality, excellently contained within a cinematic and diffused dimension with an almost twilight flavor, certainly highly effective in abandoning, at least for once, the piano/forte interplay on which the genre is now wearing itself out.

Do we really want to say it? To be honest, the pleasure of hearing delicate blues fragments tinged with an oneiric crimson jazz ("I Had A List And I Lost It," four minutes of perfect pop synthesis) is truly more alive than, to mention another, the bare, milky serpentine paths of "Golden Sands," shining as needed but, at the same time, a more easily labelable episode within certain instrumental boundaries. "If Wishes Were Like Horses" and "Floating Truth," from one end of the album to the other, are two litmus tests for the Drift at their most bifrontal that you can grasp: one orchestral and airy, split in two by an impetuous dialogue between guitar and trumpet (Miles Davis featuring Godspeed You! Black Emperor?), the other disarming in its nakedness that brings it close, even, to the discreet cool jazz of Koop and F. S. Blumm. Then, if you get a little tired of the ambient swing of "Smoke Falls," which the author believes is nothing less than splendid, focus all your efforts on a jewel of inestimable value as is, precisely, "Uncanny Valley." One of my favorite tracks of all time in 2008, and still today, almost two years later, one of my preferred listens. Stunning, for the way the vibrations and psychedelic textures of the guitar, resonating cosmically everywhere, are pierced by a brass section at the edge of free, a disturbing agent on a wall of sound in diminuendo, complete with a fanfare finale.

Verba volant, scripta manent: "Memory Drawings" is the album for you. Here. Now.