Toronto's instrumental post-rock combo Do Make Say Think (with Justin Small on guitar, Charles Spearin of
Broken Social Scene
on bass and Jason MacKenzie on keyboards) imbued their early albums
with irregular flows of electronic, electric and acoustic sounds,
yielding a
fragile hybrid of free jazz, psychedelic dub,
Canterbury-style spleen
and progressive-rock,
and occasionally sounding like a subdued, weak version of
Godspeed You Black Emperor.
Do Make Say Think (Constellation, 1998)
opens with the ten-minute 1978 in the vein of
Peter Green's psychedelic jazz.
The jangling guitar of Le'espalace evokes a bucolic atmosphere against alien synthesizer drones.
After the sleepy repetitive orchestration of If I Only, the band relaxes
in the majestic but slow Highway 420, transitioning from spaghetti-western twang to romantic saxophone.
Dr Hooch is the opposite: fuzzy guitar over busy drumming that creates neurotic tension.
The more complex Disco & Haze opens with a spiraling Pink Floyd-ian theme that gets drowned by a massive Jimi Hendrix-ian distortion and dissonant saxophone jamming.
The 19-minute The Fare to Get There is a dub and droning acid trip.
Spearin, drummer David Mitchell, and guitarist Ohad Benchetrit had already recorded Microgroove (1997).
Some of the first album's magic is missing on Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord Is Dead (2000).
When Day Chokes the Night sounds like a castrated psychedelic rave-up
and
a louder guitar hijacks the jazz-rock atmosphere of Minmin.
The 12-minute Goodbye Enemy Airship feels a bit too repetitive and harsh.
On the other hand,
The Landlord Is Dead is a masterful oneiric deconstruction of hard rock.
& Yet & Yet (2002), the first album without MacKenzie,
sounds improvised and unfinished,
at the same time brainy and soothing, but indulged in the method
without caring enough for the message, and therefore resulted
largely devoid of content.
The ethereal Chinatown easily wins against
the crescendo of drums and guitar in End of Music: loud is not more for them. They indulge in
much more dynamic pieces like the nine-minute Reitschule, but mostly
sound meandering.
Soul and Onward is an interesting experiment of country-rock contaminated with jazz saxophone.
And the nine-minute Anything for Now rediscovers the poetic melancholy of the first album.
The sprawling
Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn (Constellation, 2006),
a three-sided vinyl release
structured as a set of three-movement suites ("Winter, Country, and Secret"),
achieved a quiet grandeur of aural depth.
This time the attempt to compose more complex and dynamic pieces works at least in
nine-minute Fredericia, which moves from delicate whispering to frantic trotting to hysterical fanfare and so on.
The carillon-like lullaby Auberge le Mouton Noir accelerate turning into a sort of Sufi dance.
The ten-minute Outer Inner & Secret instead varies a bit too wildly failing to coalesce in any of its parts.
Ontario Plates is quintessential languid dreamy Do Make Say Think despite
the final crescendo.
Hooray Hooray Hooray is a welcome venture into noisy psychedelic
keyboards-driven nonsense.
The much simpler
You, You're A History In Rust (Constellation, 2007), featuring even
two songs,
sounded like a transitional work, standing between their progressive
instrumental past and a future of song-oriented concepts.
The real protagonists of the music were, perhaps, the production details that
turn each song into a sonic puzzle.
Justin Small and bass player Katia Taylor (his wife) formed
Lullabye Arkestra and released the relatively punkish
Ampgrave (Constellation, 2007) and the even more aggressive and jarring
Threats/Worship (2009).
Do Make Say Think's
Other Truths (2009) contains four lengthy pieces that continue the
quest for a balance between entertainment and brainy rumination.
The program is similar to Ennio Morricone's. The result leans more towards
the brainy side of the equation, mainly for lack of imagination.
Meanwhile,
Benchetrit's solo project Years debuted with Years (2009).
Stubborn Persistent Illusions (2017), their
first album in eight years, was even more disappointing.
