| Prefixmag |
 High Places has risen to prominence on a high swell of good buzz. The rare 7" vinyl releases that the band put out were collected together on the album 03/07-09/07, which Thrill Jockey released. That legendary experimental label is also handling this self-titled album. Much like Brightblack Morning Light, High Places is a male/female duo that plays heady, hypnotic music. Rob Barber and Mary Pearson recorded High Places in their Brooklyn apartment, employing everything from guitars and banjos to kitchenware. "Gold Coin" is inspired by Kahlil Gibran's poem "The Prophet." Thrill Jockey says the group's name comes from the duo's love of rooftops and mountains, but the music of High Places is also conducive to other instances in which the word "high" might come into play....full text |
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| Cokemachineglow |
2008 has turned out yet another year in which music crit opens with statements both cane wielding and grayed for their tendency to mark dissimilarity if not recycled trends. Mine is no exception, but High Places, like 2008, demands such statements, considers them like the kitsch they turn out to be, and ultimately pegs good fashion sense across chiasmic divides. I’d like to think it’s an indication that music has become a way past articulating difference and is now comfortable being of it.
So here it is, my fist-shaking, doom-mongering opening statement: to the degree to which anything is allowed to be “long-awaited” these days—and one wonders if leakage, where losing patience over less than a two year wait, is returning us to the land of the 45 and yearly releases—High Places’ debut qualifies. A short series of excellent singles, compiled as 03/07-09/07, were released this summer as a sort of primer for High Places’ snapshot contemporaneity: their less-is-more insistence on being a duo, despite this music’s polyrhythmic and densely layered quality, evokes Byrne and Eno tooling around with meta-statements about making music. Except the rub is there’s no statement to it, no meta, no sociology paper waiting to be boringly birthed.
High Places may have been our contemporary concept of long-awaited, but only because it seems like this is the only year in which it could have presented itself. It needed the Avalanches, the Go! Team, El Guincho, and Matmos to have exhausted the novelty of the methods and left the means to very familiar ends. There’s a build, a gradual, patient construction of tones and dynamics against which Pearson’s vocals, doled out with steaming ladles of reverb, are searing the atmosphere above Barber’s pseudo-World syncopation. And that level, probably the one which we should be most quick to give a damn about, means High Places is an indie dance album about rhythm rather than dancing, that’s danceable without pandering. It doesn’t sound anything like the music of its scene yet does sound like about a trillion things from elsewhere....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| Using samples, loops, found sounds, household appliances, and a highly developed sense of childlike joy and wonder, High Places create some magic on their debut full-length album. The duo of Mary Pearson and Robert Barber take a get-in-where-you-fit-in approach to their sound, splicing in elements of indie pop, electronica, world music, dub, and outer space kids music and ending up with a sound that isn't miles away from what fellow sonic adventurers like Panda Bear or El Guincho are doing, but retains more than enough individuality and invention to be totally unique and original. Credit Barber's amazing ability to weave bits and bobs of noise and sound into a blipping, jerky music that soothes the ears and makes your feet want to move. It could have easily ended up a jumbled mess or a corny gimmick, instead it sounds like a thoroughly modern update on the kind of primitive music humans have been making all along. Pearson's vocals too deserve all kinds of praise. They are unfailingly sweet without being sugary, sometimes treated and trippy but always directed straight for the heart. She gives the whirlwind of sound a stable and very human center. Within the group's hermetically sealed and unified world of sound there is enough variation to keep things very interesting, whether it's stuttering dance beats on "Gold Coin," the heavenly clouds of what sounds like bells and strings but could be anything on "Papaya Yeah," the almost Chinese guitars on "The Storm," or the clattering steel drums on "The Tree with the Lights On It," Barber and Pearson show a mastery of atmosphere and dynamics without sacrificing the beauty of the melodies and the impact of the songs. High Places' debut lives up to the promise of their singles (and then some) and is hopefully the first of many impressive and inspiring records to come from the duo....full text |
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