Alex Delivery, Star Destroyer

Musique Concrete. Krautrock. Spacerock. These are some of the terms floating around in sound-bite bubbles above the collective head of Brooklyn quintet Alex Delivery. Certainly, these are some of the forces at work on their debut album, Star Destroyer. At its best, Star Destroyer combines these elements in elegantly shape-shifting exercises in diametric reconciliation. At its worst, the album winds up a lost train-of-thought, steadfastly chugging along the tracks.

Debut single “Komad” opens the disc with pummeling drums, metallic keyboard squalls, and a minimalist bass line. Through its ten-minute span, “Komad” plays games with melody and noise, like a sonic Ouroboros. Separated into several distinct sections, the song repeatedly finds melody devouring noise, which then in turn devours melody. These changes are not nearly as abrupt or shocking as could be imagined, however. Rather, the parts segue into each other in a very organic progression. If this track can be seen as an evolutionary process, it’s clear that melody has the Darwinian advantage; by minute five, the angular, metallic keyboards which dominated the first half of the track have faded to the background, now serving as unlikely support to a very dance-ready mix of keyboard and bass. A string arrangement draws the track toward its close, which offers a fun-house mirror image of its beginning. The metallic noise bursts are back in full force, but now the sound is driven by rudimentary electric piano and a simple vocal melody. If the entire album worked as a macrocosm of this track, the self-contained universality of the whole thing would be wondrous. It would be like a sonic fractal, combining mathematical calculation and mechanism with organic transitoriness in wondrous synchronicity.

“Rainbows” marries a shuffling swing beat with a softly warbling organ and understated, half-spoken vocals. Fluttering just above the surface is a variety of “non-musical” sounds. This track is much more readily approachable than its predecessor, though not as rewarding. The track closes with the de-evolution of melody into pure sound collage, though the transition is awkward, as if the band lost track of where they were going, or got bored, and just threw in some noise for lack of a better idea. This unfortunate ending deflates the melodic impact of the track, without adding anything in its place.

“Milan” seems to promise more of what “Komad” introduced, starting out as a very cerebral quasi-melody supported by understated vocals and various sounds of indeterminate origin. Don’t be deceived by the first two minutes, though — this track is probably the most fully-realized track on the album. Once it begins to slough off the noise-rock trappings, “Milan” ends up sounding like The Sea and Cake imitating Can or Faust. Motorik-inspired drumming hurtles along as shimmery keyboards and New Age bass dance around one another. What sounds like a steel drum should feel out of place, but doesn’t. Plucked strings a la The Dirty Three bring the piece to an understated close, marred only by another oddly placed noise concession, which awkwardly wrests control at the final moment.

“Scotty” is an interesting mash up of noise-rock bombast and hurdy-gurdy wackiness. Initially reminiscent of Florida duo The Goslings’ brilliant 2006 noise release The Grandeur of Hair, “Scotty” quickly sheds its noisy pretensions, and offers a delightfully tongue-in-cheek respite from the somewhat trying seriousness of the majority of the album.

“Sheath-Wet” is definitely the low point of the album. It’s just too long, and not only because, at 11:09, it clocks in as the longest cut on the album; it just doesn’t go anywhere. Alex Delivery is not really a jam band, but it tries for that here. The only enjoyable part of the album is the scale-following keyboard lick that repeats periodically throughout the song.

“Vesna” finds the band giving fairly free reign to sound. Aside from a pretty vocal harmony, much of this song is built on ambient sounds, like birdsong. Plenty of shimmering cymbal and occasional marching band drum rolls add an interesting touch. The back half of the song is almost an entirely different composition, having an air of late-period Brian Wilson. Happy and sprightly, this is an interesting way to end what is a largely gloomy record.

When Alex Delivery’s blend of style and concept gels, it works alarmingly well. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of potential for pitfalls in this approach. When they are unable to bridge the stylistic gap, they fall headlong into a musical black hole of their own creation, forever frozen (at least it seems that way, at times) on the event horizon of a groove that is too thin to maintain itself indefinitely. When they figure out the ebb and flow, the whole thing comes together organically, only to fall apart again a moment later, only to reconfigure itself again and again; a perfectly designed system feeding off of its own demise.