(09.11.05) The last time I saw Wade Alin, he was on stage surrounded by a
crashing surf of buzz-saw guitars and chaotic electronics, howling
into a microphone as if he was straining to vomit up his heart. The
band was Christ Analogue, one of those vaguely industrial machines
filled with the clatter of wrecked machinery, brittle electronics and
ephedrine-fueled guitars. Imagine my surprise to hear
Metropolitan, the record by his new project, Atomica, where the
angst is traded for heartbreak, the guitars for violins and the cold
clatter of jilted machinery has been swapped out for the warm morphine
drip of a trip-hop inflected turntable. It’s not that Alin’s gone
soft on us; he’s just deigned to remove the metallic shell and let us
touch the tender flesh beneath.
It isn’t his voice you will hear on Metropolitan. Discovering
evocative chanteuse Lauren Cheatham when he first relocated to Chicago
(following many years in New York City), Alin realized her voice was
the anchor of the record. She is the elegiac angel who adds an
organic warmth to the songs as she channels Portishead’s Beth Gibbons
through a veil of thick silk while Alin surrounds her with a wealth of
strings and brass and electronic equipment.
“Bittersweet” hangs on the cusp of a turntable loop, a tiny cry of
warped vinyl that sounds like it was rescued from the Portishead
Dummy sessions and let loose in Alin’s studio to make small
bird noises from the corner of the room while Cheatham’s fragile
ballad is laid down over a bed of strings. Static from an old record
haunts Alin’s siren in “Gun” as she sighs through an old microphone:
“If I knew now / How to learn from the past / I would be who I wanted
to be.” A rusted loop plays behind the sordid rhythm section (stolen
from the corner jazz lounge where they’ve been trapped for a decade or
more) and tiny ephemera from a phantom guitar whispers and pleads
beneath her voice, lending desperation to her sad tale. Percussion
echoes through “Pollen,” the sort of reverberation which rattles
throughout an abandoned building (or heart) while Cheatham’s narrative
voice travels through a bustling city (that echo of sound again) and
yet never manages to not be alone.
A bleak despair bleeds through Alin’s retrospective re-creation of his
time in New York City, and Lauren Cheatham adds such a weary
worldliness to his lyrics that to listen to Metropolitan is to
hear how a city can break your heart over and over again. But Alin’s
efforts through Atomica aren’t to break things, but to move through
and rectify the destruction of the past. He wants to gather all the
pieces and fit them together once again. “You can’t say I’ve never
tried to love you / You can’t say I’ve never tried to die for you,”
Cheatham sings in “Salt,” and her voice, tarnished by the persistent
weight of the city, remains pure at its core. The music of
Metropolitan is suffused with the melancholy that so pervades
trip-hop but Alin and company never succumb to the entropic end
inherent in its decay.
Metropolitan is out now on Positron.
