The Timeout Drawer: Alone
Consumers Research & Development

Mere months after releasing the stunner Nowonmai, The Timeout Drawer returns with Alone, a six-track mini-suite that—wouldn't ya know it—is just as accomplished, with judicious sequencing creating strong narrative flow throughout its twenty-three minute duration.

The band impresses on many levels. Avoiding the soft-loud trap into which it could so easily have fallen, Timeout members instead show themselves deft practitioners of controlled nuance on what must be a compositional peak for the group, the elegant epic “Man Must Breathe.” The song gracefully shifts between placid and tumultuous moods, moving from lulling melancholy and placid flute passages before building into an avalanche of incinerating fuzz. Here and elsewhere, the material unfolds organically, the group never shoehorning it into odd or unnatural directions.

If you thought the group's range was fully catalogued on Nowonmai, guess again. The EP includes a heavy, vocal-based rouser of astonishing intensity (“Come Any Closer and You'll Feel My Claws”) while the group's brief riff on the Tubular Bells theme (here titled “The Exorcist”) is so incendiary it'd make Mike Oldfield's hair fall out. Plus there's delicate meditations (“Women and Children Line the Rocky Shore”), funky grooves (“There's Just an Empty Space”), and atmospheric soundscaping (“With Cold Feet and a Warm Heart”) and, sweetening the deal, the disc includes the video for the blistering “Bursting With Tears, I Commit To Destroying You.” Needless to say, a superb addendum to Nowonmai.

April 2006