Pendant - To All Sides They Will Stretch Out Their Hands

Huerco S' Brian Leeds returns with his second album under the Pendant moniker and serves up a collection that's both a tale of two sides, and a pretty onpoint distillation of the West Mineral aesthetic he and his crew of likeminded producers have cultivated the past few years. First off, there's a lot of music here - close to 70 minutes in fact. The opening two tracks are imposingly long ambient excursions with pointedly emotive and ambiguous titles in a way that suggests Leeds is targeting some other grander, emotional narrative, not unlike The Caretaker. Beautifully textured and unhurried, this is pretty much where i'd expect to find a Pendant record, expanding on that sensational debut that introduced the whole WM universe. Where To All Sides... pushes new ground is in its final third, and suggests Leeds has spent serious time studying the insectoid micro-detail oddness of Ben Bondy and Mister Water Wet. The Story of My Ancestor the River has an almost free jazz like quality, disruptive and arresting in a way that makes a mockery of the ambient tag. That it's positioned right in the middle of the record suggests that's entirely intentional, as if daring the listener to make false assumptions. The real highpoint, though, is the 18 minute closer, Sometimes I Go About Pitying Myself While I Am Carried By The Wind Across The Sky, which reads like an Explosions in the Sky title but possesses an eerie rattlesnake-like hiss that perfects that great trick of confusing the natural with the synthetic - where does the one end and the other start? With these track name, we're in a similar space to Claire Rousay's emo-ambient experimentation, though Leeds seems less persona-driven in his work, favouring the ambiguous but leaving enough clues to suggest some other meaning, not unlike those long form Burial tracks from a few years back. An often subtle but certainly perceptible evolution. The West Mineral universe might have found a new planet…