Constellation
2007
You, You're A History In Rust
About This Album
The fifth full-length from Do Make Say Think begins with a brief, minor-key modal piano and jazzy snare and cymbals intro that sounds an awful lot like an homage to Talk Talk's atmospheric masterpiece, Laughing Stock. You, You're a History in the Rust quickly veers from that intro into more familiar DMST terrain, but Mark Hollis and company's seminal record is an apropos touchstone for this Toronto collective's songs, which are built with similar emphasis on mood, texture, and dramatic ebb and flow. Like its excellent predecessor, Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn, Rust was recorded in DMST's favored remote haunts, and the old barns and cottages provide sympathetic ambience for the band's increasingly organic sound. Many of the themes seem plucked -- quite literally on the John Fahey-like "A Tender History in Rust" -- from the air, furtive patterns that appear like flickering shadows before they're given weight by the band's elegant horns, electric guitars, and two-drummer attack.

There's a suite-like nature to most of the songs, for which the opening track offers a blueprint of sorts. After its Talk Talk-like intro, "Bound to Be That Way" slowly emerges with an intricate riff which the band then takes through several wardrobe changes -- atmospheric keyboard washes, blaring horns, and guitar rave-ups -- before deconstructing the riff back into its elemental parts.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4 and 7)

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