Colleen - Les Ondes Silencieuses (Japanese Edition) (2007)

After a 2006 EP, Colleen et les Boites à Musique, that featured music boxes, Colleen's third, largely string-based full-length, Les Ondes Silencieuses ("silent waves"), begins with a relative big bang. Opener "This Place in Time" kicks off with a panoramic cacophony of viola and cello that quickly fades out to a pretty, filmic harmony of long, drawn-out chords and tension-building silences. Colleen's usual urge to interweave loops of electronics with vocals and strings is absent here; instead, the opening track is so listless and chord-driven that it sounds like an exit-- either to an album or an Ang Lee film.
For much of the album, there's no palpable machinery at hand except a microphone. There are subtle effects lent to the classical guitar on "Le Labyrinthe", Colleen's seeming homage to Renaissance-era lyre ballads. Precise rhythms and ever-climbing scales between two guitars may suggest "computer," when in fact the song is simply a study of musical dialogue, and of polyphony. It's free of percussion and completely a relic of a distant past. Similarly, "Blue Sands" is breezy, inviting, and ancient. Slightly reverbed guitar plucks and windy strums recall Joni Mitchell at the dulcimer or Arthur Russell at the cello. Hollow harmonics on the viola reel and see-saw in the song's gorgeous climax, and the guitar remains in the background, adding a subtle counter-rhythm.
"Echoes and Coral", with its hints of watery field recordings and gong-inspired melody, sounds more like Mira Calix, to whom it's increasingly easy to compare Colleen since the latter relinquished the laptop in favor of a global range of strings and percussion. The song could easily be bells heard far off during a walk through a Buddhist courtyard, and yet there's a clear, traditional composition behind the seemingly random, relaxed taps of metal. "Le Bateau", also suggesting Calix's creeping, melody-free wanderings about strings and keys, knits itself into a cohesive, cognizant melody-- just the thick plucks of a viola shifting from mood to mood, relaxation to urgency.
The other star instrument here is the clarinet, which notably appears on "Sun Against My Eyes" and makes a pretty, but a little hokey, complement with the guitar. The tempo on this and most of the other tracks is so slow that it can be frustratingly lulling. But I can think of many situations when "Sun" could render a scene, a meditation, or a non-automobile TV commercial perfectly sad and memorable, and in fact it's one of few well-paced songs here. It's energetic in places, even urgent, and feels fully fleshed out, while many others here are sheer ruminations. Lovely as they are, many of these songs are little watercolors that might not find the same kind of audience as Colleen's electronics. However, they might find a new audience in those that dug Greenwood's score to There Will Be Blood, classical string fans or players, and anyone with painterly patience to spare on a crisp winter afternoon.