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By: Josh Potter
Ever wonder what happened to those kids in high school who played French horn and clarinet in the marching band, had calligraphy all over their notebooks, quoted a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Genet">Jean Genet, named their sneakers, built dioramas for fun, played volleyball and Go, whistled Bach and could tell you everything you'd ever want to know about various extinct bird species? Well, they have a band, and it's called Make A Rising.
Forged by brothers Justin and Jesse Moynihan in West Philadelphia, a neighborhood rapidly becoming the outermost borough of avant-pop (home to Espers, Fern Knight, Man Man, Need New Body, etc.), Make a Rising has snowballed into a vaudevillian quasi-cult for this, their most ambitious, fully-realized album to date. Infinite Ellipse and Head with Open Fontanel (High Two) - a title designated by the symbols thereof - is a constellation of piano, guitar, violin, accordion, reeds, strings, and pretty much anything else one might find in their grandmother's attic.
Indeed, it seems at times during this epically disjointed album as if the band had fallen into a costume trunk while playing dress-up only to discover a portal to a parallel world. Fortunately, Making A Rising had the good sense to crawl as far as they could down the rabbit-hole. A cappela intro's are dismantled by percussion, slashed by Zappa-esque passages, enveloped in Reichian horn vamps and resolved by vocal harmonies owing something to Brian Wilson. Their contempt of genre designations is not, however, a hip, polyglot flaunting of musical literacy; it is instead the natural result of a fluid integration of styles into a truly singular musical vision.
Belying the cardboard and poster-paint aesthetic they exude, the scope of this album is huge while the production is exacting. Parts 1 and 2 of "Woodsong" are cartoony gems of chamber-pop and give way to truly gorgeous solo piano evoking Erik Satie. "How's About a Love Supreme" is a worshipful drone, complete with chattering bells. Akron/Family comes to mind in all the right ways during "Peaceful Paths" and is probably the album's strongest pop-tune. If nothing else, the album is superbly balanced and moves from dense, classical complexity to pop levity, often in 4-minute tracks. This is a true feat considering that influences as diverse as Stravinsky and Lightning Bolt teeter on the same fulcrum.
If Fritz Lang were still shooting the dreamy, silent films for which he was known, Make A Rising would surely be scoring them. A sonic diorama, this disc will transport you.
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