Music Review: Anathallo's Canopy Glow

Artist: Anathallo
Album: Canopy Glow
Label: Anticon
Release Date: November 18th, 2008


Rating: 8.5 out of 10





When I first heard of Anathallo circa 2002, I casually dismissed them like I do a million bands. Back then, I only knew of them as my friend Tim's cousin's band that played shows sometimes in Mount Pleasant, Michigan which was about a 20 minute drive from Midland which is where I grew up. In our group of friends they were famous for having what we called "The Clapping Song" which was a song that had a ridiculously cool clapping pattern. It always makes you feel good to know that their is good music growing up around you.

I had lived in Kentucky for about a year or so when I first went to college and met a fella named Davy in my English class. We instantly bonded over our love for old Tooth and Nail and The Promise Ring and he schooled me on bands like Mineral while I unsuccessfully tried to convert him to Jeff Buckley. Upon talking one day, he was talking about his favorite band ever and they were called Anathallo. I was very much taken aback, as I didn't realize that Anathallo was anything beyond a small local Michigan band. Apparently, while I was shifting my shoes in the Kentucky dirt, Anathallo was making a name for themselves as being a ground-breaking, rhythm-mastering, superfan-creating musical collective like nothing else anyone has ever seen. Davy continued to tell me about their 7 or 8 member band and how they have these incredible songs where the instrumentation is beyond comprehension. They were professionals unlike any other indie band I'd ever heard of. People talk about their 8 hour a day practices every day and it's pretty believable if you've heard their unparalleled rhythm shifting or their almost Vegas-worthy live show that features about 20 different percussion instruments that are played in between the other 3 or 4 instruments that each member seems to play. A band that was seemingly spawned right out of Interlochen.

Anathallo put out a series of successful EPs and more than a few handfuls of national tours before releasing their first full-length Floating World in 2006 which was a masterful, if almost inaccessible, collection of songs that focused on a Japanese folk tale and Matt Joynt's hyper-literate writing. The album was filed with lush arrangements, heart-breakingly beautiful songs like "Kasa No Hone (The Umbrella's Bones)" and propelled them into the indie-rock stratosphere for a lot of folks. They are a peerless band that seems to polarize listeners like most good bands do. Many an aspiring musician has knelt at the Anathallo altar trying to catch just a drop of their talent or maybe through osmosis pick up the ability to switch between 7/4 and 5/4 like they (and Sufjan) can. Others seem to be put-off by their complexity. There is a whole lot going on in each song, and how could there not be when you have a cast of 7 or 8 different musicians. The surprising thing is that the band never lets itself get too carried away in its own ability and creativity, although I know folks who would disagree.

On November 18th, they are releasing their 2nd full length entitled Canopy Glow and it takes their impressive abilities and grasp on composition and marries them to an even more subtle yet concentrated focus on songs. The album is rife with the intricate rhythms and hurried, yet soft melodies as Joynt tries his best to fit a whole book into each line, which fans have come to love and expect from the band. The album starts strong and grips you with the simple-starting "Noni's Field" and locks you in with the joyous palm raising splendor of "Italo". Every song on here is crammed with beauty and it spills out in hand-claps, stumbles out in bells, and cements itself with the Ooo Ooo Ooos that are softly swung in stereo. There seems to be a strong emphasis on solid and concise songwriting on this round of songs and it is perfected in "Northern Lights" which is a surreal sonic version of the phenomenon, and with the gripping story in "All the First Pages" of an astronaut who comes home from space and can't seem to look his wife in the eyes quite the same anymore.

(The artwork for the album is equally as hauntingly beautiful as it features the piece entitled "Temma on Earth" by the Chicago-based artist Tim Lowly who was just featured at The 930.)

Stylistically, the album is much more subtle than their previous effort and its sparser arrangements push Joynt's vocals to the foreground which helps focus the attention on the actual song and not the parts of the song. It seems to revel less in sound and more in emotion and feel (which is a tough line to walk). They pull it off beautifully. There are only a few minor parts of the record that seem a little forced when the melody doesn't quite seem strong enough to carry their full-bodied arrangements, but overall, it is a wonderful record that falls into that special bin of records that I keep for the days when I forget.