To Blacken The Pages — Bogland
“Bogland” is created from a very limited palette: essentially, guitar, voice and some scattered electronics - and To Blacken The Pages stretch and pull this set-up to produce an entire album. In this “maximalism”, its very, very evocative of tapes I used to receive (or indeed make myself) when I was a young tape-trading man. The problem really, is that the set-up isn’t stretched very far at all - the limitations are soon established and found out. So we have a few tracks with dark, buried vocals, and a few tracks with eerie, buried electronics; but ever present, and certainly not buried, is a mass of very repetitive guitar work. The main tone of the guitar is either droning riffery, or unconvincing noisy improv. The first of these is much more successful, and on tracks like “Megalomaniac” and “Echo Sense” a psyche-y drone is built up well enough. The “noisy improv”, on the other hand, pales very quickly. There’s a serious dearth of sound, timbre and technique exploration, alas; more often than not, the guitar is simply set to “stun” - with a hard, attacking style that often aims at an aggressive wildness, but fairly resolutely fails. Theres very little space in the playing; though, rather than any hyper-kineticism, its more as if the guitarist is afraid to rest.
So, its not an album that will be gracing my stereo again - but it did set me thinking. The production on “Bogland” is clear and shiny - but what if the whole thing had been recorded through cheap mics to a tape machine? I suspect my ears would have enjoyed it more, or considered it “better”. It brings to question the true “quality” of many of the tapes I used to receive and enjoy - how much did the lo-fi or no-fi production affect my appreciation? Obviously such a production adds a textural quality, “hides” some weaknesses in content and gives the recording a certain tone or atmosphere - one I enjoy. So, if “Bogland” were to be recorded onto dictaphone, I have no doubt I’d listen to it differently. This isn’t any kind of criticism of To Blacken The Pages, just an observation, really. Regardless of the production, “Bogland” tries to create unorthodox songs with its bare sound palette; a brave but unsuccessful venture thats weighed down by smothering guitar work. Its not irredeemable - shorn of unnecessary guitar, “Battered Heart” could have a definite creepiness; and “I Never Believed” has a pleasing sense of “wayward blues” about it. But these are very small chinks of light, really. The album tries to fuse unorthodox song-writing with guitar improvisation, but neither of these elements stand up on their own; and they combine to worse effect.