Summer of Seventeen — Summer of Seventeen

Summer of Seventeen is a supergroup, a collaboration between Monika Khot, William Fowler Collins, Daniel Menche, Faith Coloccia, and Aaron Turner. Of these, Menche is the only name familiar to me, though I will admit to not knowing too much of their output. I’m reviewing a promotional CD in a card wallet, but the album is available on vinyl and digitally. The album, Summer of Seventeen, has eight tracks, most around the four or five minute mark with one considerably shorter, and two close to eight minutes in duration.

The recordings do sound like collaborations, for reasons I can’t pinpoint or explain, but this is not a criticism at all. All the pieces are meticulously constructed and weighed, unlike many collaborations in this area there is no sense of participants piling on layers; indeed, the general tone is rather restrained, and this contributes massively to the feeling of foreboding and dread that permeates Summer of Seventeen. The first track, "Chorus of the Innocents", is all reverberating beeps and drones, later joined by machine rhythms; the effect is actually suggestive of a Throbbing Gristle transported to the present day. It has that same organic feel, sparseness, and tonal quality. With that opening piece, I thought I had perhaps sussed out the album straight away but the second track, "Perceived Slight", jolted me out of that. It starts with a similar feel, a hanging, picked guitar riff accompanied by sparse beats, but then a distorted, aggressive vocal appears - joined by choral drones - creating an odd piece of Power Electronics. There are vocals on following tracks but nothing as remotely abrasive. "Love Without Things" begins with ethereal vocal drones, before juddering beats punch in; these have a glitching feel to them, as well as a very effective modulation effect that adds disembodied pitches. The shortest track, "Community of Aesthetics", is constructed from vocal drones and metallic percussion, and if there is a ‘sound’ that characterises the album as a whole, it is perhaps this meeting of drone and precise, unorthodox percussion and rhythms. "Spirits of Redeemer" has almost Aphex-esque beats, dilapidated and spluttering noise, again joined by echoing vocals, shifting and modulating. "Cultural Orphan" begins with whispered vocals and hanging guitar notes, and the track unravels into something suggesting The For Carnation abstracted to its extremes; this feel is replicated, perhaps even more so, on the last work, "Theatre Needs an Audience". In between these two, the penultimate "Porous Aura" is the most droney track on Summer of Seventeen, building, dropping, then rebuilding; the drop, where a monotonous, muffled click beat is surrounded by reverbed vocals and drones is a genuinely beautiful passage, where time does stand still.

Whilst I said that this album does sound like a collaboration, it is a superb, coherent collaboration that creates and maintains a distinct sound and atmosphere. The simple, restrained palette, with consistent guitar, vocal, and raw electronic sounds across the album gives the feel of a ‘proper’ band, rather than any piecemeal, thrown together affair. The twanging guitar does stop Summer of Seventeen being easily reduced to a ‘sound-y/droney project’, and also invites the hypothetical thought that the entire venture could be seen as extremely abstract remixes or reconstructions of post-rock (‘post-rock before it became unbearably awful’, that is). This tension between abstract experimentation and song forms is a definite quality and virtue of the recordings, sitting in a valley between that will perhaps annoy some but enchant others. The collective talents of the group result in an album with meticulous attention to sonic detail, and one that neither takes easy routes nor deploys shallow tricks or displays.