Have you ever found yourself staring at your collection of Crystal Stilts and Mogwai, longing for a band to come along and just shove all of it into seven songs in 40 minutes, adding just a touch of psychedelia and prog rock along the way? If you have, may I recommend Miracle Condition?
Have you ever wished for Sigur Rós and Deerhunter to have a love child? Has this wish ever inspired you to fire up GarageBand and combine the talents of the two bands into a bastard amalgamation? If you have, I should probably let you know about the album Miracle Condition.
Have you ever bought Sleepytime herbal tea (you know, the one with the bear in pajamas on it) and thought, “Why can’t they turn this soporific beverage into a band?” If you have, then good God, go buy yourself Miracle Condition’s eponymous first release already!
This album is for anyone who has ever lain awake at night wondering what happened to the members of minimalist punk band U.S. Maple. All you insomniacs can rest easy, because Pat Samson and Mark Shippy (and some other, non-U.S. Maple guy named Matt Carson) have shaped themselves into the Windy City band I’ve been going on about for the last three paragraphs. Their debut album is now out from Tizona, and it provides two-thirds of an hour’s worth of what I have dubbed “indie Enya” music.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a fan of bleak, spacey music as the next gal, and Miracle Condition provides just that: long guitar delays, slow, deliberate playing, leaving the high notes hanging in the air, pensively layering sounds to form complex songs. I’m just saying it might not be such a good idea to operate heavy machinery while listening to them.
The few times the band breaks out of the indie Enya mold they meet with mixed success. Vocals feature prominently on the second track, “The Wandering Y”, a blend of abstract, fanciful instrumental and ‘60s-style psychedelic singing which, despite its potential, fails to be exciting or distinguished. “Into the Bay” fairs better, dropping the hippie sound for the expected mopey voice. My personal favorite is track six, “Assignment”. Its vocals carry a haunting, echoing quality, which sets this song apart from the rest of the album.
Squarely in the middle of the album is “Alphaspectra Rising”, Miracle Condition’s ugly stepchild, the likes of which they will hopefully keep tucked away in the attic henceforth. From its labored, unoriginal intro to the unfortunate prog rock section towards the end, “Alphaspectra Rising” is eight long minutes of mediocrity. The rest of the album so closely resembles the work of previously mentioned bands like Deerhunter, Sigur Rós, and Mogwai that I was left wondering why they even bothered. Why form a band to create nothing new?
Miracle Condition, is little more than a mash-up of cuttings from earlier albums by more original bands. Here and there they leave their musical mark on the album, at times betraying hints of their ‘90s roots with moments of grungy dissonance, but these marks are do not appear often enough, and are not strong enough when they do, to set Miracle Condition apart from its antecedents.
Miracle Condition isn’t a bad album per se; it’s just nothing new. As a fan of Sigur Rós, I especially liked track five, “Anthem”, where the thick layer of high-pitched guitar moans becomes a musical atmosphere. Hopefully with their next release this Midwest trio will hit their stride and find that one special characteristic that will set their music apart and imbue it with a charm and personality all its own. The last track on Miracle Condition, “Arrival”, ends with a crashing wave of cymbals, giving it a feeling of drowning, of finality. An omen, perhaps, that the band has reached a defining moment where they can either raise their collective head above the wave of similar bands or sink beneath it.
Track List:
1. / (3:01)
2. The Wandering Y (5:22)
3. Into the Bay (6:09)
4. Alphaspectra Rising (8:04)
5. Anthem (6:54)
6. Assignment (4:57)
7. Arrival (5:38)
