Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light
- Bell Orchestre
- Band Name: Bell Orchestre
- Record Label: Rough Trade
- Release Date: Nov 15, 2005
- Critic Score
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[Bell Orchestre] varies its cunningly sequenced, gratifyingly brief instrumental tracks with such old-fashioned amenities as textured melodies, pleasing dynamic shifts, and passages that, if they don't actually r-o-c-k, at least bound down the road in an excited manner.
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90Capacious, intimate and brimming with both whimsy and tension, Recording A Tape is what classical music might sound like from some advanced alien civilization. [#70, p.86]
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Recording's musical vignettes display equal parts languor and incitement. [#11, p.105]
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While it drifts away from the listener somewhat during its middle section, Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light is, for the most part, a captivating listen.
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78Whether the album achieves its titular synesthesia is debatable, but Bell Orchestre tap into a wide, mesmerizing range of the spectrum.
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70There's a beguiling musicality at play that puts pleasing melody at the centre of even the most outre detour. [Dec 2005, p.102]
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70There's just enough rock spirit here to keep Recording A Tape... too weird for Barnes and Noble background music. [Dec 2005, p.104]
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70A timely twinkle of apple crisp bells, hearth-warming handclaps and belly-rubbing brass.
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A debut that sounds a lot like New York urbanites the Rachel's and the Clogs, but a little more dangerous.
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The first third or so of Recording A Tape lags a bit, mostly because Bell Orchestre seems reluctant to show all its cards right out of the jewel case. However, once you reach "THROW IT ON A FIRE," the horns and percussion begin to drive, and the album grows progressively stronger.
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70Bell Orchestre don't always make good on their ambitions, but the results are often excellent, despite (and usually because of) their sloppiness.
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Less sparse than open, the songs resist the build-and-release structure that most other Montreal acts utilize, and they also refuse to ride a groove or play with distracting orchestration.
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65Their record runs through a range of instrumentalist archetypes and quietly surprising turns-for-the-worse, from electrified screech to tape-op minimalism, through pastoralism and soundscapery, to numbers where they knock out all manner of feigned sturm und drang.
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At its best, Recording a Tape still sounds like little more than the product of a few precocious marching-band dropouts, an empty warehouse, and good intentions.
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42Flavorless chamber pop. [Jan 2006, p.91]
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 7
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Mixed: 1 out of 7
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Negative: 0 out of 7
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davem8Solid album, see them live, it's fantastic.
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kurtt9I personally find it quite refreshing and I love how the album has a whispy unity that works as a whole. It really has grown on me!!!
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coolerstillr.muckfluck4yeah...not quite. no.