Arriving after a Steve Albini-produced trove of mopey wonder (1991's Seamonsters) and a collection of relatively more lighthearted singles (1992's Hit Parade), the Wedding Present's fourth album Watusi found David Gedge and company hitting a particularly brilliant stride in terms of songwriting and creative development alike. Produced by Seattle personality Steve Fisk in a time when "grunge" was a breathless buzzword, there's some rock muscle happening on tracks like "So Long, Baby" and "Shake It" that veers more toward flannel-friendly guitar tones than C-86 fuzz, but the jangly melancholy of the uptempoed "Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah" finds the perfect balance between the two, with booming drums locking in with spindly guitar lines and electrified organ. Tracks like "Spangle" tap into the band's trademark way with syrupy slow songs of crushing heartbreak, this time supported by the scratchy tones of Fisk's church organ drum machine. Watusi is one of the more dynamic Wedding Present albums, with both songs and production stretching into less predictable territory, presenting Gedge’s by now familiar ruminations on difficult love and disintegrating relationships with an extra dose of daring. The band's straying from the formula is at its best in forms as divergent as the long fits of Velvets-like guitar squall on "Catwoman," and the tender, a cappella back and forth between Gedge and Beat Happening vocalist Heather Lewis on "Click Click," the album’s finest and most impacti Moment
Mirrorball is a melodically affecting exercise in ethereal ambience -- precisely what you might expect from two artists whose CVs list collaborations with Harold Budd. That's not to set Budd up as an overarching influence, though: Foxx and Guthrie come to this album with their own long-established and distinctive pedigrees, the former as an electronic pioneer and the latter as chief architect of the Cocteau Twins' unique dream pop lullabies. Mirrorball bears the musical fingerprints of both, combining Guthrie's trademark hypnotic, echo-laden melodies with the kind of otherworldly, cavernous spaces that Foxx mapped on Cathedral Oceans. Like David Bowie on "Warsawa" (and Guthrie's former bandmate Elizabeth Fraser), Foxx sings lyrics that aren't recognizable as English; he favors improvised vocals that suggest a hybrid of Latin and glossolalia. Foxx's sonorous baritone -- often set amid austere synth washes, slow, droplet-like piano notes, and Guthrie's reverberating waves of guitar -- contributes a hauntingly beautiful, almost liturgical gravitas. Most memorable are "The Perfect Line," "Spectroscope," and "Empire Skyline," relative miniatures that conjure up cathedral-sized ambience; and "Luminous," a more amorphous, oceanic piece, whose sounds and words overlap and bleed into one another, spreading like ink through water. Foxx and Guthrie also explore more boldly defined arrangements on "Sunshower," with its Cocteau Twins' lilt, and on the string-adorned "Estrellita," which could be the theme from an imaginary James Bond film. While these tracks are more direct than most of the material, Mirrorball is by no means a predominantly abstract endeavor. Far from it. Alongside Another Green World and the instrumental suites on Low and Heroes, Mirrorball shows that ambient music isn't only about epic soundscapes: skillful practitioners can also bring that aesthetic to bear on more compact tunes whose brevity belies their richness. Foxx and Guthrie's work makes that point emphatically. Much like its namesake, Mirrorball is a shimmering, multi-faceted artifact.
Robert Fripp's second team up with Brian Eno was a less harsh, more varied affair, closer to Eno's then-developing idea of ambient music than what had come before in (No Pussyfooting). The method used, once again, was the endless decaying tape loop system of Frippertronics but refined with pieces such as "Wind on Water" fading up into an already complex bed of layered synths and treated guitar over which Fripp plays long, languid solos. "Evening Star" is meditative and calm with gentle scales rocking to and fro while Fripp solos on top. "Wind on Wind" is Eno solo, an excerpt from the soon to be released Discreet Music album. The nearly 30-minute ending piece, "An Index of Metals," keeps Evening Star from being a purely background listen as the loops this time contain a series of guitar distortions layered to the nth degree, Frippertronics as pure dissonance. As a culmination of Fripp and Eno's experiments, Evening Star shows how far they could go.
