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Throughout High Places vs. Mankind the two further unravel as well as expand their influences and open-up their compact electronic world to include more live instrumentation and more upfront organic vocals.
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High Places vs. Mankind is their most complete work to date, which ends much as it began, with the band’s love of outright pop.
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It seems impossible that the same band that started out so ramshackle could deliver an album as splendid and tighly wound as this.
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High Places have moved on, positioning themselves on the fringes of the ongoing chillwave explosion with enough invention to outlast most of its central protagonists.
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UncutIntriguing, enigmatic and one of a kind. [May 2010, p.90]
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Some lo-fi purists will undoubtedly cry foul when they hear "The Longest Shadows" or "When It Comes," which bookend the album with slightly glossier production and an '80s goth-disco vibe that recalls Siouxsie and The Banshees or The Church. These tracks, along with "On Giving Up" and "Constant Winter," undeniably signal High Places' shift toward a more accessible sound, but they also happen to be some of the brightest spots on the album.
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Rob Barber intensifies the band's trademark polyrhythms with snappy post-punk bass and eerie dub echoes on disco-leaning tracks like "On Giving Up," while singer Mary Pearson eschews lyrics about happy trees for stories of loneliness and alienation.
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The signifiers of the band's sound are still evident--jittery rhythms, ambient instrumental passages, gauzy washes of guitar courtesy of Rob Barber. But they're more subtle, restrained, and tasteful here.
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Instead of the earlier sample-heavy style, Barber incorporates more live instrumentation, and as a result High Places feel more like a band.
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When they deviate into a treacly world of dub and shifting tones (‘The Channon’), there’s still a lineage, along with an identifiable personality.
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These might be the awkward years, but they’ve resulted in an album that’s both rewarding on its own merits and a suggestion of interesting progressions still to come.
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Recalling only bits of their awkward past-flirtations with electro-pop, this new material feels ripe with a formative momentum that only occasionally misses the mark (the elementary musings behind On a Hill in a Bed on a Road in a House, we can do without).