| Miracle Fortress - Five Roses |
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| Written by Rob van Alstyne | |
| Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 04:36 PM | |
 Miracle Fortress Five Roses www.myspace.com/miraclefortress Five Roses, the debut album from Montreal indie pop outfit Miracle Fortress, starts off with a red herring. Instrumental opening number “Whirr” falsely sets up the band as compelling ambient noise-rockers adept at layering assorted percussive toys and wordless oohhs and ahhs atop pulsating bass lines and fuzzed-out classic rock guitar leads. It’s an astonishing song that only serves to clear the palate for what Miracle Fortress really have in store – eleven tracks of insidiously addictive pop melodies filtered through all kinds of distortion and computerized manipulation and set loose on a sea of hypnotic looped noises (keyboards of every strain, hand claps, electric and acoustic gutiars, a bevy of hard to pin down electronic sound FX, vocal harmonies galore) that are actually the work of just one musician, Doug Van Pelt, recording at home. Appearing equally inspired by Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out as The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, stand out track “Maybe Lately” starts out with a vocal melody and timbre lifted straight off of “Don’t Worry Baby,” but those classicist beginnings only serve as a jumping off point for passages of woozy bleep-heavy flourishes underpinned by warm, muscular bass lines. Similar departures happen even more dramatically on cuts like “Blasphemy,” which morphs in its second half from a lightly strummed tambourine-aided ballad into a wordless sound exploration of spastic drum fills, reverberant electronic squeals and what sounds like a pan flute leading the melodic charge. The group reaches a state of stoned-out bliss on the albums centerpiece, “Hold Your Secrets to Your Heart,” in which the ambient drone of the song's two-note electric guitar intro slowly swells into a world-conquering embrace of sound. The song is kept in a state of constantly intriguing evolution through the careful placement of Van Pelt’s spot-on winsome vocals (digitally manipulated and stacked to the heavens), an engrossing synthesizer loop and a skittish electric guitar solo that intermittently flails away in the background at a quiet volume while being kept steadied by shakers, cow bells and triangles. By the time the song shifts yet again in its last quarter with the surprise late arrival of a new electric guitar figure at its center and a martial drum fill, the listener almost wishes the song could continue slyly morphing for infinity. Few of the tracks here follow any traditional pop conventions, even though Van Pelt keeps his experimental impulses in check enough to have the majority of tracks run comfortably below the four minute mark. Even those numbers that start off playing it straight with simple and immediately accessible acoustic guitar patterns like “Little Trees" are quickly wrapped in gauzy layers of sound. Five Roses is a bold voyage on pop music’s stormy outer seas where ambient electronic musicians, ’90s loving college rockers and Beach Boys fans dare to dream as one; it’s also my current front runner for the most exciting album of 2007. "Have You Seen In Your Dreams" from Five Roses |
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| Last Updated: Thursday, September 6, 2007 at 08:33 AM |
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