Enon
Issue #33
Grass Geysers...Carbon Clouds (Touch and Go)
By Wilson Brown
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
On Enon’s fourth album, sophisticated, new-wave pop numbers like High Society’s “In This City” or Hocus Pocus’ “Shave” are gone. That’s either a good thing or a bad thing depending on which direction you hoped the band would take. Here, they’re still mining for nuggets of melody in noise.
But this time around, speed is substituted for sleek atmospherics; hurried bass lines and fuzzy, cutting guitars push their way to the foreground (“Peace of Mind” and “Those Who Don’t Blink”) and the band’s dabblings with the booms and blips that characterized High Society and Hocus Pocus are no more. The melodies are still here — just minus the dance floor and the subdued cooing vocals of bassist Toko Yasuda. Instead Yasuda’s voice gets a little more oomph and sassy soulfulness on “Law of Johnny Dolittle,” “Pigeneration,” and when it follows her own bass up and down the scale hook of “Labyrinth.”
Though Grass Geysers... clocks in at just under 40 minutes, singer-guitarist John Schmersal leads the band through 12 rave-ups that flow so effortlessly into one another that it feels like a 20-minute album instead — and quite a change from the cut-and-paste schizophrenia Hocus Pocus.
Yet those who might miss the instantly gratifying hooks that “In This City” and “Shave” brought to the table might be disappointed. Whereas High Society might be the prim and proper first child who can do no wrong and Hocus Pocus the middle child who disappears into the background, Grass Geysers... is Enon’s rambunctious baby of the family demanding all your time and attention right out of the gate.
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