Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
We have got so caught up in trying to survive the whims and demands of those to who feel we owe them thanks and penance, that we have largely forgotten that we are the masters of our own imagination. In that land we control, anything is possible and the only rules that are worth are damn is that there are no rules, no impediment to the scene you can create, no image that is not possible to float as an idea into the heart of someone you don’t know.
It is in this realm of the imagination where no words are actually needed perhaps finding that even a poet can bring down the level of the instrumental to a place where the vision and resourcefulness of the dream is diluted and reduced to the sound of a sentence being passed.
The duo that make up California’s El Ten Eleven, bass and guitarist Kristian Dunn and drummer Tim Fogarty have embraced the experimental and have found a place in which the instrumental is influential. It is the place where the poet and the lyricist sit on the side-lines, find a daffodil to chew on, and relish the fact that their contribution was not required; it is in that space that the musician knows that his work can stand up satisfactorily to the rigours of the audience’s fascination.
Across the instrumental pieces Three and a Half Feet High and Rising, You Are Enough, We Don’t Have A Sail But We Have A Rudder, Listening To Clouds and This Morning With Her, Having Coffee, what comes forth through the haze of intelligently played exploration and the arguable symbolism of only hearing the sound without the human voice interfering in its presentation, is more living for the moment, to frame it, to let it speak for itself, than only being squared off in the second of time that resembles the forever chased and intangible.
Life with just sound is perhaps a finer dream in which to explore, not confined or confounded by a word which leads to another word, in this pleasure dome of non-lyrical wonder, the music sings with importance and cool insistence; a great album of significance.
El Ten Eleven release Banker’s Hill in the U.K. on September 7th via Topshelf Records.
Ian D. Hall