It is often appropriate to consider an artist’s motive for making an album. Why, exactly, do they want us to listen to their music? Do they want to change humankind for the better, á la “We Are The World”? Do they want to encourage their listeners to dance, or to start mosh pits, or to make babies? Rare is the musician who spends loads of their precious time writing, playing, and recording music for no reason at all.
So it’s probably a good idea to ask why The Atlantic Manor makes the music they do. Some info: Rick Sell, the Miami-based musician behind the artist name, is a big do-it-yourself guy. He pretty much runs the show, musically speaking, one of those one-guy operations that still has a band name implying multiple people are involved. He has no label, little to no promotion, and none of the resources that allow little acts and little albums to make it big. His website commands the reader to “DIY – go start your own band and make the world a better place.” Sell is also an experienced guy, seeing as this is his 11th Atlantic Manor effort. And yet it has to be said that The World Beneath This World is Brightening is not accessible music.
The general suggestion is that Mr. Sell does not care whether you think his music is listenable. Take the first two tracks of TWBTWIB (even the acronym is laborious): there’s “Openings” which is just a distorted, creepy kid singing, and there’s “Vessels,” which clocks in at a whopping 14 minutes and 48 seconds and is essentially just the same theme repeated over and over. To be fair, there’s something hypnotic and even relaxing about “Vessels,” which is a marathon of lo-fi guitar picking, repeating itself until you find yourself practically sleepwalking. It’s a cool effect for a song to have, but is that really the point?
The other stuff doesn’t change much. Three more lengthy numbers (each over seven minutes) drag the tempo down to extreme sluggishness, and the variations are slight. The Atlantic Manor’s equation seems to be: set chord progression + mumbled lyrics + subtle additions to the instrumentation (e.g. the one extra piano key introduced on “The Good Sons”). Some of this album is reminiscent of old Death Cab For Cutie if only because the two bands share the same repetitive, woozy vibe. This material is depressing as hell, and I was hard-pressed to find a consistently major key on any record. Granted, you shouldn’t be expecting rainbows and unicorns when the tracks have titles like “DeathCrown,” “Failing By the Second,” and “The Captain’s Name Was Death.”
How to describe the general sound of this album? Well, I’m on an airplane right now, sitting next to a man reading a romance novel, and that relentless airplane engine noise is getting past my headphones. And the drone actually fits in really well with every track on TWBTWIB, sort of a welcome accompaniment. That might give you some idea.
Sell does have a nice gravelly voice, and the warm atmosphere of “Apple Dreams,” which is gentler and less gloomy than its twin “Vessels,” is a welcome addition. The title track has the potential to be a sick, Decemberists-style pirate shanty ballad, but it feels too slow and unfinished to succeed. But the Atlantic Manor appears not to care for anything too produced or too polished, lest the music strays from the lo-fi ethos. There’s nothing wrong with having an ethos, but TWBTWIB could stand to make a few concessions for the sake of listenability. Hey, it’s cliché time: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, and you can make all the self-produced anti-commercial music you want to, but you can’t make people listen to it…unless there’s something truly awesome about it. Hopefully next time (and considering the body of work of this guy, there will be a next time) the awesomeness will show up.
Track list:
1. Openings
2. Vessels
3. Failing By The Second
4. The Captain’s Name Was Death
5. DeathCrown
6. Apple Dreams
7. The World Beneath This World Is Brightening
8. The Good Sons
9. Black River Runs
