Trouble Books

Trouble Books exist in a bubbling, blinking, gauzy euphoria that's been occupied in the past by Broadcast and more recently by some of their Ohio contemporaries like Mark McGuire and his daytime coworkers in Emeralds. In fact, the band has collaborated with McGuire in the past and it’s easy to see how the two could find common ground. RSTB was introduced to the duo through the band's Keith Freund who released a hushed, dreamy solo LP full of carefully constructed tones and field recordings last year. Upon receiving their new full length, it was no surprise that it turned out to be a gorgeous and delicately balanced affair, however it’s far more so than we could have ever hoped. Concatenating Fields is more vocal heavy than Freund's solo endeavors and the duo (Freund along with Linda Lejsovka) constructs a quivering world of light and color and sound that seems built on the tenuous conspiracies of hope and the bittersweet tugs of sense memory. The band has said the album uses Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color as a sort of oblique strategies guide and as a result the album feels intrinsically tied to the color of tones and inversely the tones of color. Tracks pulse and twist with the tortured soul of a mechanical heart, precise in its machinations but dependent on the soft flesh around it for support; and rightly so as the album utilizes an array of sequencers but is ultimately humanized, as the band says, by the "varying speeds of their unstable tape recorders." Wrapped in an equally lovely gatefold cover, the LP is available in a limited edition of 300.

Listen: Trouble Books - Dead Bee in a Golden Bowl

Support the artist. Buy it: HERE