Forms

The Forms - The Forms

This decent-ish self titled album is the second by the Forms. The first few times I listened to it I caught up with e-mails and watched unrelated YouTube clips. I wasn't bored. A few times a good hook or chord would get my attention, even having heard them twice before.

Steve Albini, the producer who made Nirvana sound good and Pixies sound better, produced their debut 'Icarus' and this follow up which is a perfectly even record of what's called, with nauseating pretentiousness, 'post-rock'. That's music that uses rock's staples and rearranges them. The Forms play guitar, bass, drums and piano but not necessarily in that order.

On one song, four chords, each played for a about a second, are repeated for at least ninety seconds. Minutes later, two notes are played on a guitar to sound like church bells. Ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding, its sound is as hard to convey as its duration. Albini makes this album sounds like it was recorded in a spacious empty warehouse. The echoes and the air between the musicians feels as loud as the notes. What keeps this album from feeling like a gig is the lack of emotion in the songs.

The Forms ply a quiet brand of rock and do so diligently. They apparently averaged just thirty-five seconds a day during the mammoth recording session for these thirty minutes of music. Going on this record as evidence, the Forms don't have a heavy or light side. Nor do they have fast or slow moments. In fact, this album has no moments or asides. The songs all sound alike. Except for two that last seconds and are just punctuation marks for the ones they follow, each is the same piece of weird, spacey rock.

Albini has brought a lot of emotion to bands' sound. Just compare the plastic Nirvana of 'Never Mind' with 'In Utero', where they sound like they're playing in your garage to an audience of one. If the Forms are playing in a warehouse, the listener certainly isn't welcome there. It's not Albini's fault. This album is too distant and unassuming to benefit from him.

This doesn't make 'The Forms' a bad record. It's nice to hear variations on a themes otherwise well established. But this music of the gods, for which mere mortals are not fit, reaches for the sky and instead hits a low sky blue ceiling and not even Steve Albini can raise it.