CD review time is here!

So how about These Were The Earlies (obviously) from The Earlies? This is a band that I find fascinating as much for how they make music as for what they make. Half American and half English, The Earlies are a greatly augmented quartet whose music seems at first to be a creature of the recording studio, similar to the later Beatles works, where so many small details of clarinet, taped sounds, layered vocal harmonies and other touches lead one to believe they wouldn't dare play these songs live. In fact, the band does show up and play these songs for audiences, with a large retinue of additional performers to create that same layered sound from the disk.

This disk has only eleven tracks--and one of them is less than half-a-minute long--but it leaves a huge impression. It's always a little scary to compare a band to the Beatles, but this really only goes as far as the efforts to use the studio and elaborate instrumentation as a signature sound. In fact, The Earlies bring a spacious, pastoral sound of slow-building introductions decorated with woodwinds and keyboards in the opening and closing tracks while a couple of the middle tracks give a more hurried, intense sound. Seriously, it's like a day in the country with a sleepy dawn, bustling visit to town, then a calm evening following by a formal farewell coda.

I don't want to give the impression of a sleepy, old-fashioned disk where all the instruments are analog--even classical. There are agreeable touches of ambient synthesizers and rapid-fire, digitally manipulated percussion and tape loops here and there to catch your ear on repeated listens. As if that isn't reward enough, you also get some very solid songs such as the opening "One Of Us Is Dead", where the mordant title line grabs and holds you for the rest of the song. Singer Brandon Carr is un-self-consciously simple in his approach, letting the arrangemetns and melody breathe together (even when the harmonies are thickly layered like a chorus of overdubs). Listen to him manage the sliding, drifting accompaniment of "25 Easy Pieces" like a grizzled veteran actor, willing to let an artsy director manipulate the entire scene while he focuses on reading a straight, unaffected line. Marvelous!

9 out of 10

CDs listened to today:

• Steven Winteregg: Visions And Revelations
• Iannis Xenakis: Éonta