Review Summary: Bell Orchestre's debut album makes a fantastic mesh of ideas and styles. It flows easily throughout and makes some great, fresh songs. However, it fails at some points with the band overextending themselves.
Brass is awesome. What is more musically powerful than a gigantic, heart-pounding chord from a drum corps or an uplifting, angelic trumpet choir? There are virtually no limits to the amount of sound one can put through a brass instrument. Through all the years of technological advancements in music, brass remains a huge category of musical instruments, seeing almost no change in the method of playing or the sound of the instrument. The tubing, quality of brass, and mechanisms all found new improvements, but the pure essence of a brass instrument remains the same. That’s why I find it so depressing to see the gradual disappearance of all brass instruments from popular music today. The funk music of the 70s capitalized on the power of brass, especially in bands like Tower of Power. However, as synthesizers became more advanced, the synthesized brass sounds began to make real brass obsolete, and why not? It takes less people, less salaries, and it makes more money for the people who matter. However, a few more experimental groups continue to invent new uses for brass instruments. A leading group in Canada, The Arcade Fire, gains a larger cult following every day. A few key members of the band formed their own side project, Bell Orchestre, with a purely instrumental focus.
Their debut album Recording A Tape the Colour of the Light finds ambition, ideas, and emotion bottled up into one volatile container of music. There are two ways of looking at the album. On one hand, it really takes many typical post-rock musical ideals and puts them in a unique voicing of mostly French horn, violin, and trumpet. The songs grow and build to climaxes that, while never a surprise, are written brilliantly and throw a few curveballs in the midst of the climaxes themselves. Through these slight nuances, another contrasting point about Bell Orchestre arises. The fact that the members even thought of making the brass instruments so prominent and cashing them with the upbeat, Arcade Fire styled drum beats is brilliant. In theory, the idea of a typical dance drum beat mixed with soaring French horn and trumpet melodies sounds terrible, but Bell Orchestre somehow makes it work, if not for a little while.
This jumping back and forth between contrasting points represents the album well. Bell Orchestre experiments with their sound often and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Luckily, they open with a great first impression, quite possibly the best on the album.
Les Lumieres Pts. 1 and 2 show off the band in full form.
Part 1 is just the typical post-rock epic condensed into 6 minutes. It builds on one simple melody that layers different voicings throughout while varied percussion sets the perfect growing atmosphere. The whole song is a mastery of suspense and growth. However, while most contemporaries of the band make their climax simply a louder reprise of the melody, Bell Orchestre builds variations on the melody before launching into a section with no sense of chord structure or time. It is simply a chaotic mess that ends together. While not the loudest part of the song, it serves as the climax since it is such a challenge to the mind as compared to the quite simple structure of the rest of the song.
Part 2 builds off that intensity to move much more uptempo and make a song more akin to The Arcade Fire. It flows perfectly, never hesitating or drawing away from the groove laid down by the drums and bass.
From here, the band starts to step out of their comfort levels.
Throw It On A Fire pictures a folk band sitting in a barn, playing their story-laden songs. Accented with hand claps, the song is a representation of the band’s experimentation making a great song.
The Upwards March, however, gets old quickly. The idea of the beautiful chords mixed with the upbeat, dance like drum groove works for a slight while, but it grows tiring and somewhat annoying after about half of the song. The idea is conveyed well, as it conveys a perfect picture of climbing upwards, a struggle to reach the top. More experimentation comes in the shorter tracks that simply serve as breaks between the longer (although still modest length) songs.
The Bells Play the Band is a light song that features just as it says, bells.
Recording a Tunnel (The Horns Play Underneath the Canal) also sounds just as it says. If anything, Bell Orchestre picks perfect song titles. When the album finally gears in for the final stretch to the end, it picks itself back to the brilliance of the opening.
Salvatore Amato makes a much more subtle and overall more enjoyable use of the upbeat dance-like groove idea. It uses the violin much in the way Godspeed You! Black Emperor likes to, a screaming voice overtop of all the other melodies.
Salvatore Amato is easily the most subtle song on the album, and its subtlety makes it amazingly beautiful and an obvious standout.
Bell Orchestre’s debut album is a melting pot of many ideas from many different influences. The classical tendencies of French horn player Pietro Amato stand out through the use of chord voicings and harmonic structure while the more contemporary styles of bassist Richard Parry show in the grooves and melodies. The collaboration of these exemplary musicians works in many cases and they know when something sounds wrong. However, they tend to like their ideas a bit too much and overextend them sometimes, although they keep their songs relatively short compared to other post-rock bands out there. It serves as a great tool for the band to get their more experimental ideas out in a new environment rather than The Arcade Fire. The album is an easy listen and although it has its low points, it makes a fantastic overall album and a great starting point for the band.
Recommended Tracks:
Les Lumieres Pt. 1 and 2
Throw It On A Fire
Salvatore Amato
