Allegories - Surreal
Auteur
AR0001 - CD/digital
1. Acro(bat)/When I Hold My Breath, Like This
2. Shaking Like A Leaf
3. Surf's Out/The Tumult
4. Stage Fright
5. Summer Market, Winter Racket
6. Aww, Ooo, and Others/The Orchid and The Epiphyte/The Burying of the Hatchet
(Mike Love's Back)
7. Killed a Carrot
8. Peaches
9. Grass Toboggan
10. Zanglust/Tom's a Ladder
11. Fish Water Desert Trapeze
12. Acro(nym)
Surreal Auteur is a tumbling snowball. Like an abstract painting it was built on improvisation and reaction. Beginning as content for a commissioned noise tape, the album started as a series experiments with different techniques in sound. These experiments were then sifted and reacted to. Those reactions were then also sifted and reacted to, and slowly, songs began to form, and from those songs three distinct suites also emerged. Surreal Auteur is the result of a year worth of intricate and obsessively focused tweaking and arrangement. We were so excited by it that we named our label after it!
Here are a few things people have said about Surreal Auteur.
"Rather than place their instruments into an easily separable mix, Allegories melds everything together into a wall of sound that is part ambient, part pop, and completely dynamic.
Like any album that would fit under the moniker of "shoegaze," these songs gain clarity over time. Inattentive listeners may discard this music as being badly recorded, but this album reveals its intent to anyone with a good ear. The duo's wall of sound comes apart to reveal reverbed guitars, tribal drums, and soaring vocal harmonies. Despite a lack of initial clarity, it's a sound that--by pop standards--is extremely orchestral.
Like a book, it's tough to get a full understanding of any song--or
the whole album, really--by just starting off in the middle or only taking in
the parts that seem easiest to digest. Allegories' power is held in the larger
picture of things, not separable hooks and verses. If Surreal Auteur
is a story, it's a sonic one, and every song has an important context within."
-The Needle Drop
"It’s just so delightfully abstract. While the tracks
may have their own titles, there are no separate songs, really. The album is,
more than music, an exploration of the secrets of the mind. Like that state
between sleep and awake… this is music to dream to."
-Pretending to be Japanese
"[Grass Toboggan] knocked me for six when I heard it first time around. Subsequent listens have proven no less exotic, no matter what way I approach it I continually fail to unravel a single word yet always leave with a bleary intoxication from the dreamy swirls. This is Panda Bear with less obvious reference points, Adam Bentley and Jordan Mitchell venture into the great unknown and come back bearing all manner of gourmet audio. The remarkable news is that there is a full album of wide-eyed glee and its called ‘Surreal Auteur’, a movable feast that will have you entranced from beginning to end. Much like their website Allegories are willfully obscure but never taxing, in fact their patchwork quilt of hidden messages add up to a grand mystery the likes of which Arthur C. himself would have been proud. It’s at times like this that I find myself fighting back the tears at the beauty of it all. Music to ensure you never grow old (take note Alphaville). - MP3Hugger.com