Album Details

• Artist: Growing
• Album: All The Way
• Label: The Social Registry
• Year of Release: 2008
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2008-12-05

This is a guitar and bass duo that creates droning, airy trance tunes that challenge your belief that there are only two instruments at work. No computers or synths were used in recording "All The Way," as Growing have taken pains to proclaim. This is all the colors and mayhem amplifiers can possible provide, as well as the mutated sounds produced by running the instruments through an old drum machine.

The webs of drone and fragile feedback create a beautiful, if menacing tableau, and at times this is a really moving record. "Green Flag" begins with some late 60s Floyd atmospherics, and that kind of meditative psych wash continues through "Wrong Ride" to the last majestic buzzing of "Reconstruction." It is hard to believe that there are no samples or found sounds here, as the songs seem to shift environments, always with an echoing undercurrent of specific places or things. Maybe that is just from the simple, real guitar and bass weaving in and out of each other's noise. Either way, this is eerie, gorgeous stuff.

"All The Way" showcases the Brooklyn duo at work in the heart of sound. This would be great meditation music, if you were meditating as if your life depended on it. Contemplative but edgy, Growing stuns and reassures at once. Pretty impressive for a few instruments and a lot of volume.

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