All right, time for some real talk—Colin Stetson is perhaps the most wonderful musician currently active. It doesn't matter if you don't know him or even if you don't like him (it's barely even expected, honestly—his is a niche within a niche within a niche), the man is doing things beyond groundbreaking and he deserves nothing less than to have the very ground he walks upon kissed in adoration by the awestruck masses.
Colin Stetson, best known for being part of Arcade Fire and Bon Iver's touring band, could easily be construed as a one trick pony—after all, the man records all his music independently and with nothing but his faithful saxophone at his side.
A setup like that doesn't exactly enable diversity, let alone invite critical acclaim. Stetson, in all his glory, finds a way to work around his technical limitations and bleed quality.
By setting up approximately a billion microphones across the recording studio, on his sax and even on his body, Stetson sounds less like a single man and more like an army. Using the clatter of valves opening and shutting and the constant flow of air in and out of his lungs Stetson creates a backbeat for his sax playing, a poor man's percussion made all the more impressive by the fact that he manages it all without any loops or layers. Hate the music if you must, but respect should most certainly be given where respect is due.
Those Who Didn't Run, Stetson's latest EP/victory lap, doesn't deviate from his time-honored tricks. Its two tracks, both burly, ten minute jams, feel like the big brothers to the songs on this year's devastatingly perfect New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges. They're all of the same ilk; throbbing percussion over wobbling sax grumbles and the click and clack of valves and the hum of Stetson's muscles' ebb and flow.
Here, though, the songs don't feel as constrained as they did on past releases. For all their triumphant success, Stetson's songs on Judges felt like they shut down just as they were ready to bloom. We were promised the universe but only saw the microcosm. Those Who Didn't Run is a fulfillment of a promise made some six months back, and it is devastating in its success.
It's hard to talk about the songs in terms of their actual musical merits, though. Like the best drone and the best ambient music the goal here isn't to craft hooks or to worm a song into your head, it's to create an atmosphere, a musical soundscape.
Stetson's songs are frequently sparse and desolate; they almost feel lonely. The End of Your Suffering, the b-side to the EP, starts with a meandering sax trill over a patient thumping and doesn't yield until nearly seven minutes. It's drone at its most literal; repetition as an art form.
The title track, meanwhile, feels more like a dystopian club song, with its throbbing bass and looping melodies; there's a single buried somewhere in here underneath several metric tons of weirdness, I'm sure of that.
Both songs are big and dark and profoundly mesmerizing, pictures of mystery worlds and universes that could only flourish inside Stetson's mad imagination. And that's where Stetson's unquestionable success lies; he doesn't write songs, he dreams up worlds and then brings them to life.
He's an artist of the purest form, dabbling in emotion and sensation as opposed to visceral pop thrills and trills, and Those Who Didn't Run serves as an almost redundant statement of raw talent. It's most certainly not for everybody, but that won't stop it from being one of the most fascinating and wonderful releases of this year.
A+
