Snowmine’s latest marks a slight shift with strong results in sound and theme
New York-based band Snowmine’s music is some of the richest around, combining ethereal echoes, graceful vocals, classical orchestrations and the occasional saucy tribal beat. This has made their music sometimes inaccessible, too dense and intricate for immediate appeal regardless of how rewarding they might be upon a close listen.
However, on their new album “Dialects,” their sensibilities come through in a cleanly lovable package. “Dialects” opens with the lush, smooth “To Hold an Ocean,” which has the verbal delicacy and dreamy vocals of a Fleet Foxes song combined with an irresistible, minimalist backing. It could be read as a concession to the demands of fast-centralizing indie genre, but its follow-up, “Rome,” proves this to be the wrong answer.
“Rome” has a structure much like many of Snowmine’s songs, luxurious and sprawling even as each moment is engineered. It’s too loose to adhere to the demands of the indie anthem, too experimental in format.
That balance, between catchiness and experimentalism, is what makes “Dialects” tick. It’s a hard line to toe, but Snowmine walks it with aplomb.
Case in point: perhaps the catchiest, poppiest song on the album, “Columbus.” On “Columbus,” the band applies their unique aesthetic to a structurally traditional song, with an irresistible chorus: “All these thoughts that I knew you’d find, I hid between the lines.”
Even as they delve into the anthemic pleasures of mainstream indie, they hew to difficult themes, such as hiding identity, numbing feelings, and isolation. Follow-up “Further Along, Farther Away” is a similarly easy listen, but fifth song “You Want Everything” makes clear that despite their dreamy sound, Snowmine has a lot on their mind.
“It’s clouded in my head,” the chilly, dark song begins. “I’m sleeping wide awake and you’re sleeping like you’re dead.” The song is cloudy indeed, straining back and forth with depressive wooziness — just look at the chorus line, “But don’t ya know it’s suicide/to want.”
Having set such a diverse sensibility in the first half, the album keeps up the momentum in its second half. Standouts are the entirely instrumental “Safety in an Open Mind,” a restrained fusion of gaspy electronica beats and crunchy tribal sound, and the spacey finisher “Dollar Divided.”
Snowmine’s history of delicate precision in their music continues in the very strong “Dialects,” which marks a slight shift in their music for large effect.