Timber Timbre
Hot Dreams

It's almost easy to be visionaries if you move in imaginaries created by someone else. Timber Timbre is not as lysergic as those who play with the floral atmospheres of the sixties or the acidic ones of the seventies; they don't write concepts about Alice in Wonderland: Timber Timbre has created its own unique imaginary.

Taylor Kirk recites his visions and obsessions in a solemn baritone, elegant yet emotional, sometimes shaded in black - between the most elegiac Nick Cave and especially the most downcast Richard Hawley (which I mention on a precious suggestion from a friend) - and Timber Timbre set them in a chilly Canadian forest, dismal, gloomy, disturbing - no less than in the excellent previous Creep On Creepin' On - shamanic and minimal. Wooden and linear rhythm section, as the moniker refers to wood. This means that in the timbre of the bass, the snare, and the toms, you'll hear the warm sound of wood, of forests: a boon for audiophiles; a concretion probably not even sought, but equally effective. The few touches of acoustic, the electric tremors, the pianos, the strings, the sampled voices are chiseled and have the power to semantize the many silences, to never make you feel comfortable, not even in the morbid warmth of the title track, which fetishizes black music while Kirk fetishizes a black woman, his hallucination in the form of an underground Mardou, and the odd, mathematical sax closure sounds both reassuring and alienating, frozen. If there were a need to identify Timber Timbre, perhaps a indie folk singer-songwriter/crooning with western, soul, and light psychedelic hues could work. But it's not enough: Taylor Kirk could have been a Cormac McCarthy character, with that mustache and those hair if the frontier had been the USA-Canada; Timber Timbre would have been the perfect soundtrack.

The lugubrious march of the instrumental interludes that serves as a refrain in Beat the Drum Slowly, that ascending phrase of vitreous, synthetic piano while the chord remains still, that delirious on the cemetery of celebrities; the elegant soul of Run From Me with its authentic obsessive-compulsive warmth and passion - not the fake one of Lennon's Run For Your Life - the unhealthy epic of This Low Commotion, the pulp hues of Resurrection Drive Part II and Grand Canyon; the recurring image of the hunter, in Kirk's poetics, which returns powerfully in Bring Me Simple Man: Timber Timbre has created a world, a parallel Canada where no one apologizes, everything is slow and empty, everyone has profound voices and sweaty obsessions.

It came out this year, I'm not doing it justice; it's a great album.