CLOUD ARCHIVE Left the Bright Opening
(Leapyear Device; 2007)
The year is nearly over and I’ve neglected to write this review ever since I was first given the album at a Cloud Archive show. So I’m rectifying that now. Let’s say I’m doing it in a retrospective sort of way. So here for your reading pleasure is Mike G.’s Favorite Local Album of 2007.
Floating through dreamy ambient passages and heavy crashing passages alike, Cloud Archive’s music can definitely bear the title of post-rock. Simply calling it beautiful is much simpler and more apt. Which isn’t to say that every single song is composed entirely of beautiful melodies or textures. It’s the type of beautiful music that hurts you, the type of beauty that you sense much deeper than your aesthetics.
Left the Bright Opening is a tour de force. The production is flawless. Each song grows organically out of the next as Cloud Archive creates a complete musical topography. Opener “Navigation” preps you for flight as band leader/keyboardist/electronics guy Bryan Von Reuter creates a thick wall of ambient texture that perfectly encapsulates the wonder and immensity of what is to follow.
The album’s real point of departure is “Bring Lions,” the aural equivalent of swan diving off a mountain. The drums kick right in and the guitars are spacey but powerful, like a face full of wind as you freefall. Next you find yourself soaring through the atmospheric guitars of “Never Catch a Falling Knife,” while below you there is a roiling plain of electronic glitches and twitters. “How comes it’s so great a silence has fallen?” is the most ethereal track on the album, sounding as if you’ve plunged into a deep valley on the ocean floor and are simply floating along with the current.
Clocking in at just over 20 minutes, Left the Bright Opening closes with “How to Smoke Roses,” a song that comprises Cloud Archive’s journey back to the beginning, so to speak. It is an epic track that starts meanderingly, like you’re just letting the tide carry you back to shore. About halfway through, the urgent drums and guitars come back in, as Cloud Archive picks up velocity and altitude once again. The song then settles into a long, serene passage dripping with nostalgia for the places we’ve been, and “How to Smoke Roses” fades out much as “Navigation” faded in.
Left the Bright Opening was released on The Leapyear Device, a label based out of Oakland that is home to many other fine local ambient, instrumental, and indie bands, like Roots of Orchis and Serene Lakes . Look for big things from Cloud Archive and The Leapyear Device in 2008!
