Action Pollock- "Songs of Hope" Review

I've always been attracted to avant-garde music made by people that can actually play. 

There's something about someone with obvious musical talent deciding to abandon any and all preconceived notions about music and just make whatever holy-hell racket they want that makes experimental music better. For example, Duchamp's Fountain wouldn't be nearly as interesting if he hadn't already done Father. 

Action Pollock, a sound-art group from New York, clearly have the ability to play. Their abilities, hinted at on the first track of the album and then fully explored on the second, are well above par. This makes the subversive qualities of the album, the drone, the noise elements, all the more interesting.

Songs of Hope is two tracks long, clocking in at just over half an hour. These are long songs, ladies and gentlemen.

The first track, "Songs of Hope," is a 22 minute ambient drone. Unlike a lot of music in the genre, it continuously kept my attention. It accomplished this by having absolutely brilliant textures. The track begins with a grinding, Swans-esque tone with buried guitar feedback. It has a certain musicality, a certain softness. Eventually notes start to take shape as a repetitive, cloudy pattern. This pattern degrades into a noise-break very similar to Metal Machine Music. Not a bad choice. I've always found that album to be immensely uplifting.

Make no mistake, this is a very happy, ecstatic record, one that spits in the face of the melancholy, self-seriousness of the experimental music scene. It's also very much informed by the city of New York. It seems to capture its vibe, its nooks and crannies, waking up at 5 in the morning and smoking a cigarette by the Hudson. It's nice, comforting.

The second track, "Blacked and Blue,"  is much more overtly musical, a post-rock, ambient guitar jam reminiscent of something like Explosions in The Sky or Angels and Airwaves. It has some subtle middle eastern rhythms that give the track a sense of uniqueness. It sounds triumphant, victorious.
This record is a beautifully-textured piece of happy-ambient. Highly recommended.