Seeding the Clouds

VINYL FORMAT. "Its first note booms mutely like distant thunder. A guitar and, more lightly, a keyboard loom over rolling drums like blinks of heat lightning, and from these first strokes, Whitesand/Badlands' double vinyl release wears its stormy outlook on an imperiled, corrupt, and beautiful world like a widow's weeds. But call Seeding the Clouds a dark album, and you damn it with broad praise . . . It's not hard to get an immediate sense of how vast an undertaking Seeding the Clouds has been for Whitesand/Badlands. The material for the double LP has been in the works since the band's 2007 inception. It has weathered numerous lineup changes and the resulting ordeals of engineering the elegant compositions for mutating live set-ups; it's been a labor of vision so elemental for Whitesand/Badlands that [guitarist and founding member Andy] Larson financed the project out-of-pocket to make sure it saw the light of day, and in the carefully realized manner they wanted . . . For a single song to survive such years is triumph enough. But the ten song release hasn't just survived - it seems to have been imparted, through the hardships of lengthy arrangement and assembly, a heroic maturity. Seeding the Clouds is an album that has been wised, not hardened, by age, its pieces supple and tenderized as if from a years-long hailstorm. Whitesand/Badlands know its inroads and outlets like a star map, but these songs are vastness in four-minute cuts, so deceptively complex that no one, not even Whitesand/Badlands, could fully tame them. These are properties that Larson meekly attributes to good fortune and diligent collaborators who are loath to let sentiment hamstring the product. The fruits are audible. Whitesand/Badlands are a band blessed with an open ear and a steady hand, even as they face down the great chimeras of a troubled modern age and drink deeply from pitch-black waters. Songs like album opener 'Angels on the Pinhead' confront the compaction of the nightly news into sound bites and Twitter feeds, which leaves an entire culture bereft of nuance. The compositions brood and burn, even as they ascend into the major key. And the entire album works tirelessly to paint a lit-by-lightning portrait of a world in grave peril that maybe, just maybe, is worth saving. But Seeding the Clouds is a portrait of darkness visible, composed of symphonies in miniature that stick to the ribs but never overbear, that illuminate but never blind. The care that forbade the band from severing a single song to crunch the album onto one vinyl disc stares out at the world from a beautifully decorated sleeve, rings out from every groove. By the time 'Whale Song,' the album's finisher, rings out, Whitesand/Badlands have laid a gentle hand on every discordant, reverberating whim in their playbook, tempering their wildness into works as organically complex as thunderclouds. It's a dim and beautiful record, forged, from the first note to the last jacket fold, with a whaler's sweat and blood." - David Hansen / CityPages.com