Does It Look Like I'm Here?

Describing Emeralds' music feels a little like capping that underwater oil spill must: how do you get your hands around this stuff? The Cleveland trio may favor methodical cadences in their music, but their releases come fast and furious. According to Discogs.com, they've put out around 40 releases in just four years, most of them CDRs and cassettes. There are variations of mood and intensity, and each major release has its own particular signature, owing in part to changes in gear and technique, and in part to being a band that improvises and records non-stop. Any given album feels like a snapshot of the band in time.

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The problem with trying to quantify Emeralds is that potential descriptors of the group veer into the utterly formless. "Drone" and "hypnagogia" are en vogue terms that fail to summarize and completely locate the group within a movement. In some ways, definitive terms have almost become toxic. Once something is defined, it's doomed. While it's tempting to throw around terms like this, they ultimately feel disingenuous and exclusionary. Sadly its the critics' terminal plight to try to define movements, therefore containing them, suffocating them. Maybe in this specific context, I should leave the problem of defining Emeralds' sound to my iTunes; the genre tag it gave to Does It Look Like I'm Here? was simply "data."

Full Review | More Reviews from Publication | Top Rated of 2010