The Cassettes – I’ve Been Gone Far Too Long…
What if an itinerant band of folk musicians took a journey in a dirigible and met a tabla player and a theremin artist? If this is your kind of jam, you’re in luck. Just yesterday The Cassettes released the four-song EP I’ve Been Gone Far Too Long… If you know their sound from their first two albums, Writing Analog Letters (2010) and ‘Neath the Pale Moon (2006), you’ll know what to expect: an exploratory fusion of instruments that is the harder edge of live folk, or the acoustic big sister to punk. This new EP doesn’t have quite the rocking edge that the last two releases had. Instead it has a more dreamlike quality, like the kind of lush east-meets-west sound that the Beatles developed in the White Album, married to the slow stroll of a cowboy ballad.
- Listen to I’ve Been Gone Far Too Long…
The Cassettes have always been about reinventing folk standards, but not to modernize them so much as reimagine them in a speculative steampunk universe. The pace of this EP is ambling, a slow flight across the sky, a tall ship chugging its way West. Nick Kraly’s strong baseline and Saadat Awan’s drums holds down a Beatles-esque chime (Dr. Klem), a ripple of finger-picked guitar (Shelby Cinca), a banjo (Stephen Guidry) and whimsical theremin (Arthur Harrison). Cinca’s vocals are supported by harmony from Guidry and an occasional soft touch from Christina Frances, and they speak of dreamy things… The lyrics reference lost cities and new worlds, deserts and horizons and ocean voyages, and (on the bonus track) Australia. My favorite lines set the tone for the EP, from the song I’ve Been Gone: “Now the clouds break into colors so bold / Flying ships on endless trips / This is what we wanted life to be.”
If you listen closely, you can hear echoes of the long and illustrious musical pasts of various members of the band. I don’t need to go too far into it (one wikipedia article is here), but previous involvement with techno and ambient music has resulted in a multi-layered sound. You can hear the whistle of a steam engine, the lap of water against the prow of a boat, or (epicly) at the end of Watchers, at least thirty seconds of nothing but cricket song.
The Cassettes are not always this dreamy, though. Information on the band website hints of a jam session coming up in the Fall, and part of me hopes that the resulting music has more of the infamously rollicking energy of songs like Lady Faire. But even if not, I know I’ll be able to expect wonder wrapped in whimsy, packaged in sound musical form.
By Tanya Rezak