Shoegazer rock never really caught on in mainstream America, although early '90s avatars of the UK-bred sound, like Ride and My Bloody Valentine, enjoyed both critical and commercial success in their homeland. The music -- swirling, layered washes of feedback-laden guitar usually played at a pace somewhere between a slow unfolding and a deliberate drone -- and the nearly motionless performing style that gave the genre its name did nothing to feed the American appetite for either the grand gesture or the fist-in-the-air chorus. "Oceanic" is the over-used critical term, but the best of the shoegazer bands evoked nothing so much as the sea in their thickly repetitive, crashing songs.
Indie rock fans, unlike America's top-forty radio listeners, happily embraced the shoegazer sound. Indeed, in the indie arena, the genre has been enjoying a marked resurgence in popularity -- which is why it's not surprising to discover the Connecticut-based Landing and their unreconstructed penchant for the slow build, the chiming plateau, and the soft, fuzzbox-laden coda. That description might make this music sound undifferentiated and boring, but that's not the case. The band's four members make the kind of astral sound that seems to emanate, fully formed, out of nature. Circuit's songs have a steadfastly low-key feel, as if they were circling seasons instead of indie rock anthems.
"White Walls" begins the album with a minute of rising, slightly menacing fuzz that's quickly turned a bit more upbeat (if not more energetic) by the addition of chiming guitar and keyboard hum. To say that "Held" runs directly and imperceptibly into "Across the Sky", which continues through nearly fourteen minutes of deliberately layered guitar tones and a funereal drumbeat, isn't an insult. These quiet constructions, like all music that aspires to "drone", create their own reality, in which each swirling repetition only adds to the power of the eventual, small changes.
The boy/girl vocals are best heard as pure sound, the whispered lyrics ignored, and listening on headphones definitely helps keep Landing from drifting into a version of background chatter. Walking down the street accompanied by Circuit makes the world seem like it's moving in slow-motion, slowing down to stroll at Landing's unhurried pace.
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