CD Review: Six Parts Seven

Six Parts Seven
Casually Smashed to Pieces
Suicide Squeeze Records

I see a lot of CDs, and this necessarily entails seeing a lot of crappy CDs. Red flags tend to include the following: blackletter typefaces, pictures of vikings and song titles like "Awaiting Elemental Meltdown." Things were not looking good for Casually Smashed to Pieces, the latest release from Ohio quartet-and-then-some Six Parts Seven, but I trust Suicide Squeeze, so in it went.

For a moment, I thought I had once again failed to remove the previous CD from the cut-rate CD boombox on my desk, creating an album sandwich up in there (it's happened), but no: "Conversation Heart" really does begin with a gently pulsing electric guitar motif that ably sets the tone. When it's joined by a banjo, the interplay of the parts sets in motion the model that will dominate the songs here: simple, well-crafted melodic lines will be spread across guitars, lovingly passed over to keyboards, and gently handed off to the sweetly yearning harmonies of a modest horn section. If you've come looking for messy, sprawling masses of orchestration, best look elsewhere. This is wallpaper music, and I mean that in the most generous way possible. Any given three seconds off this record could have been lifted out of the careful and crystalline confines of Sufan's Illinois, but as they cohere into entire mini-suites, they call to mind other products born of the Land of Lincoln, erstwhile Tortoise member Bundy K. Brown's Directions in Music and his later albums under the name Pullman.

I first heard Directions in Music under unusual circumstances. I was at an Indian restaurant in Los Feliz in Los Angeles back in 2000 or so with a small group of friends. A DJ (in a restaurant-- how L.A.!) was spinning instrumental rock music built from spare melodies and suspended chords, and it sounded, for lack of something more appropriately critical, magical. It was languorous and lush, beautiful in an understated way that eschewed sentiment. In short, a perfect soundtrack for a twentysomething's night out in a foreign town, and to someone who wasn't far removed from the snobbery of a degree in jazz performance, it came as a shock that you could even make music like this. That was Directions in Music, but Casually Smashed to Pieces could be an able understudy for the part.

Six Parts Seven display a great deal more intentionality than Brown's project. Where DIM often seemed willfully aimless, its improvisatory roots showing through when the music got away from the players a bit, CSTP simply bleeds careful planning. The songs blend gracefully into one another, drifting across dynamic shifts with a minimum of fanfare. Since the band began as a duo consisting of brothers Allen and Jay Karpinski on guitar and drums, respectively, it only makes sense that the compositions proceed forward from the guitars. "Confusing Possibilities" builds itself up around harmonics and stumblingly unresolved strums before revealing a rising-then-falling central riff composed of slippery hammer-ons and pull-offs. The stateliness of the arrangement presses up tightly against the casual charm of the execution, and the band works the pressure back and forth. The flesh and blood players behind the music are present throughout, revealing themselves through slightly muffed notes, the hum of tubes in amps (particularly noticeable on the very beginning of the opening track) and the barely audible click of effects kicking in. What makes "Confusing Possibilities" the highlight of the disc is the way it seems to draw to a close on a shimmering triplet guitar figure that goes from ornament to foundation as the song finds its legs once again. And then it happens again, the tempo slowing around that same figure, taking the song in yet another direction. The casual yet measured progression from idea to idea belies the tune's title, and this is when the album is at its best, holding your hand on the musical equivalent of a twilit, late-summer stroll.

The danger here, of course, is that an album of modest instrumental numbers is apt to come off as same-y, and that's a fair criticism of Six Parts Seven's approach. If you've spent a goodly amount of time digesting any of the other artists mentioned in this review so far, none of this album is going to come as a revelation. The best way to enjoy it is via a kind of middle distance focus that lets you absorb it without looking directly at it. Or better yet, drop it on someone who hasn't heard all those other bands yet, ideally at a hip Indian restaurant, where it might end up making him rethink his idea of what makes instrumental music interesting. It could happen.