Land — Night Within
"Nothing Is Happening Everywhere" begins the album. David Sylvian's regretful croon climbs atop an understated swirl of feedback and horns, held together by a soft, jazzy rhythm. At first it seems he's singing too many notes on each of the words, but there's a pleasant pause between each of the phrases, and ample repetitions allow the assymmetrical phrasing to sink in properly. The lyrics have a vague, resigned quality, and ultimately ring true as sincere and meaningful. "No desire for relevance, to say nothing of meaning / What a pitiful feeling / Your efforts are futile / When did we become so very brutal?" There are some runs from the clarinet that wonderfully compliment the lyrics, as well. It's a perfect smoky ballad.
After this quite well rounded first track ends, I feel quite ready to hear an entire album of Land's loose atmospheric jams paired with Sylvian's thoughtful lyrics and cerebral sense of melody. However, as it turns out, this first track was something of an overture for a dusky, quiet album that is otherwise totally instrumental.
In tracks like "Into the Blue", "Stillman" and "Cosmopolis", the influence of krautrock is clear in the way a simple drumset beat drones on and on while the other instruments create an arrhythmic backdrop of atmospheric sounds. The band also channels the cinematic twang of modern day Earth and, consequently Ennio Morricone.
Near the end of "Into the Blue", the beat drops away, and mournful, detuned chords from muted horns ring out across a canyon landscape, a distant pulsation from the floor tom providing that insistent rhythmic push that pulls the listener along wherever the music travels. Wonderfully transporting music, provided one has the patience for it.
"Nighthawks" is a masterful 2 minute interlude, a poignant jazzy lament for horns over a couple or minor chords made all the more powerful by the dedication in the album jacket to trumpet player Richard Turner, whose playing is featured here, and who has now apparently passed on. The sickly and atonal "Hotel Room" is my favorite thing on the album's latter half, intergrating dub-like reverbs into the horn swells, and a subsonic quarter note rhythm from timpanis tuned very low indeed.
The drum sound on this album, almost overly crisp, is produced to be more aggressive and compressed than everything else in the mix, and as a result I can't turn this album up as loud as I'd want to. The production is still quite pleasing to the ear, overall, and the lush layering gives a lot of depth to the music, so it is never too empty or boring, provided the listener is in the mood for something slow and repetitious.
This album is ambient, slow and quiet but also tasteful, listenable and concise. The feeling that Sylvian should have been included on the entire album did wear off, after a couple listens, though I'd still love to hear that album when it's (hopefully) made. This recording is an understated but complete emotional landscape. Certainly, I feel it could benefit from a bit more diversifcation of sound, perhaps a tad more energy to contrast the bleak stillness of its quietest passages, but I thoroughly enjoy Land's "Night Within" from beginning to end each time I hear it.