Clue To Kalo : One Way, It's Every Way
Mush Records

Press material informs us that One Way, It's Every Way, Mark Mitchell's sophomore Clue to Kalo effort, is both a 'musical palindrome' and a 'celebratory meditation on death.' The palindrome dimension isn't hard to locate—the brief opener “The Younger The Old” (“Where I'll end is the point where I begin”) is mirrored by the closer “The Older The Young”—but why the Adelaide, Australia native should be obsessing about human finitude at such a tender age is less clear. If the thematic material does concern death (enigmatic lyrics like “The math tells the move by design; just fill in your sign” make for an elusive determination), it's belied by the music's sunny, ethereal character.

With no breaks separating the ten songs, the 42-minute album unfolds as a song cycle that conflates classic folk, bedroom electronica, and lo-fi production into an eccentric whole. Mitchell crafts intricate, even psychedelicized arrangements that evoke the baroque stylings of the Brian Wilson-Van Dyke Parks Smile era (heard in “The Older the Young,” for example). At other times, Clue to Kalo traffics in hallucinatory, ‘60s-flavoured electronic folk that recalls Caribou (“Come to Mean a Natural Law”) and the sophisticated pop of The Postal Service (“As Tommy Fixes Fights”); though not Beatlesque per se, Mitchell's album could be imagined as a pastoral expansion of “Tomorrow Never Knows” into full-length form. Despite the dense sound (instrumentation includes sax, accordion, chimes, flutes, recorder, violin, and 'gu-zheung'), the music lightly drifts from one episode to another. Songs often morph through multiple time signatures in a single piece (“Seconds When It's Minutes,” “The Just Is Enough”) and, though striking, the effect diminishes the clarity of a given song's character. Mitchell possesses a breathy voice that's not unpleasant and the intricate vocal counterpoint that appears in many songs impresses too. At the same time, his singing is too one-dimensional; more variety beyond a delicate hush would strengthen the music's emotional dimension.

September 2005