I discovered Marconi Union quite recently when I read an article claiming they'd created the world's most relaxing song. This turned out to be horseshit, but the song was still pretty good, so I enqueued Beautifully Falling Apart for further listening. And guess what? It's pretty damn relaxing, like a lot of the post-rocky droney ambienty stuff it resembles. The music is a mixture of hazy texturalism and carefully placed delicate melodies. The tracks are deliberately soporific, as you'd expect from a band who deliberately set out to make the most relaxing track ever, but they're also quite interesting, with minimalist string arrangements and occasional guitar strums adding real-world instrumentation to the soundscapes.
It's very difficult to find much to say about this album. If I were still a real music journalist, this is the kind of shit that drive me into some over-reaching conceptual angle or polysyllabic word assault. It's really fucking chilled out and nice to listen to, okay? I like it a whole lot, but can it really be considered a classic? I don't know. Maybe I'll go back to this album dozens of times, or maybe I'll never play it again. The trouble with this droney stuff is it's really hard to find bad things to say about it, but really difficult to get excited about individual releases. This might be something I'll put on as background music when I want to fall asleep on some hung-over afternoon, but it doesn't get my pulse racing. AND THAT'S THE DAMNED POINT.
Overall this yet another extremely pleasant but not particularly great ambient/shoe-gazey/drone thing, and quite frankly I've heard enough. The next one I listen to is probably going to get a critical kicking for being the straw that broke the camel's back.
(I should add that I wrote this review a few weeks ago, but due to a laptop crash it stayed as a draft on my blogger account and is only now being uploaded.)
Genre: Ambient
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10
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