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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).
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Mankind across as the next step in defining who High Places are, instead of the sort of developmental stopgap that makes us wonder why we ever believed internet hype in the first place.
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If you heard Mankind without hearing their other work, you might think it was a decent record with a couple of memorable songs--kind of generic and bland, but not awful. It’s only a disaster if you were charmed by High Places' original sound and left cold by their new approach.