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Track Listing: 1. The Great Cat Migration Press: Celestial Biscuit - 22 December 2006 Overall Rating: 7.6 If there's any area musician who knows just how powerful a minimal approach can be, it's Martes Martes composer and multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Carey. Three years ago, he offered us Dragon Cat, an understated, intensely hibernal EP that combined classically-influenced post-rock with an intimate, basement-recording aesthetic to create a fascinating landscape of wintry idylls, snowdrifts, and animal tracks and impress the hell out of a lot of Ann Arbor music aficionados. One might think that with so much time between releases, Carey's artistic whims might have radically shifted, but his new record (released on the Capt. Bass label) is in most respects quite similar to Dragon Cat's—in fact its name is almost identical to its predecessor's: Dragon Cat Fox Can Scn. The album (this time a full-length) is as laden with seasonal motifs as Dragon Cat was, but whereas the latter concentrated on a single season (winter), the former touches on all four. It's not exactly a Vivaldian song-cycle, mind: it's more like a sequence of nature scenes espied by a five-year-old child through the passenger-side window during a very long car trip. That is to say it's both fragmentary (but not disjointed) and imaginative, and furthermore that it maintains a playfulness and sense of wonderment throughout that its slightly more sober predecessor only hinted at on one or two tracks. Fans of the band's debut EP won't be disappointed by Dragon Cat Fox Can Scn: it's not as eidetic in its imagery or as singular in its focus, but it's more exploratory both in its compositional range (while still maintaining the band's characteristic, off-kilter intimacy) and in its instrumentation. It's a transitional album, but a transitional album about transitions (Carey's pine martens, according to his song titles, seem to be constantly on the move), and for that reason it works better than one might imagine it would. While the instrumentation on Dragon Cat consisted mostly of synthesizer, folk harp, and French horn, Dragon Cat Fox Cat Scn is a great deal more variegated in its arrangements. There are violins, accordions, shakers, and hand-claps aplenty here, though perhaps the most prominent instrument is the recorder, which carries the melody in "The Great Cat Migration," "City Lights (Tanuki Song II)," and several others. Of the record's ten songs, two are actually transplants from Dragon Cat here: "Broken Lung" (one of that EP's most evocative tracks) and "Pine Marten Traveling Song," and while they don't seem terribly out of place among the more celebratory and festive (and often slightly better-produced) tracks on Dragon Cat Fox Cat Scn, they don't have the same mimetic power that they had in their original context. Among the others, the standouts are the album's opener, "The Great Cat Migration," and its penultimate track, "Martens at Night," which is held together by the interplay between a tense, staccato violin vamp and the interstitial negative space, punctuated with bells and recorder notes, between these flurries of bow-strokes. As a whole, the album isn't as effective as its predecessor was at communicating to its audience a sense of place, but it makes up for that in a large part by succeeding to convey a sense of motion, both through time and space, as Carey's itinerant martens undertake their seasonal migrations. Martes Martes wear their classical influence on their sleeve far more here than they ever did on Dragon Cat, and while I don't think this record is a vast improvement over the last (though the production on the newly recorded tracks displays some noticeable improvements), it's still a fine collection of songs that work well together. Brooks Thomas – Fri, 2006 – 12 – 22 16:16
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