(May 2010) Let’s talk about synesthesia for a second. Ever since I got my first taste of Emeralds in the form of their excellent self-titled LP last year, I was aware of a special connection between their name and their music. Think of a well-cut emerald: deeply green, translucent, brilliant, and finely cut. Every facet plays a role in reflecting incident light, and a well-polished emerald catches eyes from far away. Emeralds make music that is analogous to this description: precise, colorful, and glimmering. The group consists of two synthesizer players, Steve Hauschildt and John Elliott, and one guitar player, Mark McGuire. Hauschildt and Elliott provide arpeggiated, retrofuturistic, and refreshingly rhythmic synth explorations while McGuire unites the others’ ideas with his rambling, wistful guitar playing. The result is stunning both in its consistency and its execution. It glows with wonder and life, its precision is blinding, and it makes you stop what you’re doing and pay attention.
“Candy Shoppe” starts out appropriately, with a meandering melody like that of a Nintendo game which is slowly transformed into a heavenly, heavily layered composition. The second half of the song is even better – the carpet is pulled from under your feet and you are left looking into a long, tall chasm with a river of electricity at its bottom. “The Cycle of Abuse” is just as good, sounding like a five minute field recording of a world of chattering robots, like Shinichi Atobe’s “The Red Line.” “Genetic” is for fans of their earlier, longer work, and it an obvious choice for the centerpiece of the album because of its size and sheer density. It takes off with what sounds like a modified organ riff in the first few seconds and doesn’t look back from there. The sounds layer triumphantly and eventually include some gloriously distorted guitar playing before morphing into a long outro with more guitar and Game Boy sounds. The second half of the album brings McGuire’s work to the fore, which lends a nice emotional element to the music. “Summerdata” is an oddly fitting title, reminiscent of floating down a hot river on a hazy day. “It Doesn’t Arrive” borrows a little from Deepchord’s sound before developing into a beautiful, emotional guitar piece. McGuire also provides a string backbone for Hauschildt and Elliott’s crystallized freakouts on “Now You See Me,’ in addition to anchoring the dreamy, percolating sounds on the album’s closer, “Access Granted.”
Now, it would be unfair to talk about this record without a proper look at Emeralds’ history. The trio released their first album under the Emeralds alias on Wagon in 2006, and quickly followed that up with several more tape and CD-R releases in 2007. Their early material was more along the lines of drone, but it did contain hints of the synthesizer brilliance that was to come. What really broke Emeralds to a wider audience was ‘What Happened,’ their first outing on No Fun Productions. This sounded more like the Emeralds of today, much more vivid and clear than their earlier work. Emeralds, their last album before Does It Look Like I’m Here? furthered this vision, focusing on McGuire’s guitar playing and honing the carefully dated sounds of their synthesizers, paying homage to the work of Manuel Göttsching and Ash Ra Tempel. Does It Look Like I’m Here? feels like the perfect synthesis of the past 4 years of Emeralds’ work and a logical progression from their past albums.
Does It Look Like I’m Here? is refreshing because it goes where other drone and synthesizer artists are afraid to go – it is immediate, satisfying, and surprisingly has a lot of replay value. The short forms of the songs make the music more accessible and digestible, and most of the songs are directly evocative. This might be a bad combination in the hands of lesser artists, but every time I try to find something wrong with the fact that Does Is Look Like I’m Here? is more literal and direct than most drone/synthesizer albums, I’m taken aback by the infinite washes of analog sound. This is a mesmerizing album, intricately detailed and equally rewarding. Emeralds needs only to make a few tweaks to its formula to make its short songs as hard-hitting and awe-inspiring as their long songs before it becomes an invincible name in the fact paced, constantly mutating world of experimental music.
Does It Look Like I’m Here? is out now on Editions Mego. [Listen | Purchase]
