Past Lives: Tapestry Of Webs

Past Lives was formed  from the fragments of The Blood Brothers and a few other bands in 2007. Tapestry Of Webs marks their second major output and their first full-length follow up their debut EP from 2008, Strange Symmetry.  If nothing else, this album serves as a testament to the validity of the 10Listens mission statement, because it was only after many, many listens that I was able to form a coherent, stable opinion of Past Lives’ offering. Unfortunately for the album the more time I spent, the more my opinion started to veer towards the negative as little imperfections became glaring inadequacies.

I’ll start by talking what this album does right. If you like songs that run in a deeper pitch, driven by bass and percussion rather than blaring electric guitar, this album can offer you some fitting tracks to suit your needs.  What makes the emphasis on bass and low chords so effective is the immediate contrast it creates with the higher-pitched vocals of lead singer Jordan Blilie. In particular, the opening track, “Paralyzer” is a great start to the album.  It is dominated by a few simple, omnipresent bass chords supplemented with drumsticks clicking together and slight support from the lead guitar. Add Blilie’s falsetto-esque pitch into the mix and it creates a perfectly moody air that mirrors the tune’s subject matter, which plays on the themes of arousal and impotence.  Furthermore, the true strength of this simplistic bass line is the way in which it magnifies the two hearty tempo changes in the song, the first around the 2:00 minute mark and the latter at 3:05; the contrast is entertaining, and as the song drifts to the latter of these two shifts in tempo, accompanied by the sonorous echoes of backing vocals and cymbals, one cannot help but think, “Yes! This is an album headed in the right direction!”

And you’d be wrong, quite wrong. No sooner has the first song ended than you are greeted with the cockpunch that is this album’s second track, “Falling Spikes”. Oh, how I loathe this song. The subtle, evocative qualities of the first song, and the stellar buildup it engenders is replaced by brash, nearly incoherent screaming. Literally, the song starts off with Blilie forcibly yelling the title of the song into your earhole. It so harshly clashes with the song before as to be completely aggravating and off-putting. This 2:40 minute track could never be over soon enough in my opinion, though I’m sure there are some people who enjoy Past Lives’ aggressive style.

The relationship between these first two tracks is a perfect microcosmic representation of the faults of this album as a whole: it is horribly put together. This trope of slow/quiet, bass-driven songs being followed by faster/louder counterparts happens again and again. Halfway through we encounter “Deep In The Valley,” a stripped-down, instrument-driven, melancholic ballad that is almost girlish in its delicacy (to say nothing of the fact it sounds like there’s actual female backing vocals). This song dabbles in sublime synthesizer-based effects and reverberations that perpetuate the quality of  a dream. Of course, what follows it is the song “K Hole,” a track that introduces itself with a sound effect that literally sounds like the loud honking of a decrepit horn from an early 1900s automobile.

To be fair to this album, “K Hole” does mark the beginning of a  string of four tracks that are all consistent in their general sound. They are full of  guitar energy and aggressive cymbal play the highlight of which is “Hospital White,” perhaps the only fast-paced song I enjoyed on every listen, probably because it was the last of this group of four and I was actually finally used to this tempo after all of the aforementioned flip-flopping. And then, of course, the album veers back to rip off three straight tracks of just the opposite types. We’re back into the realm of instrumental playfulness and subtle vocals. The concluding track “There Is A Light So Bright It Blinds” forms a nice counterpart to the initial song on the album, as they are both cut from the same cloth. So if nothing else, I can safely say that this album did bookend itself nicely, though I have to ask: whither consistency for everything else in between?