Send "Venice Is Sinking " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork. |
 Athens, Ga., quintet Venice Is Sinking emerged in 2006 with what might be best described as a pleasant surprise: debut album Sorry About the Flowers showcased a band with some solid songwriting chops and a brand of earthy chamber pop that was easy to root for. Rather than refine the rough edges of Flowers, however, Venice Is Sinking have charted a different course with Azar, their 2009 follow-up-- though anyone who paid close attention to the intro to "Undecided" or stuck around to hear "Blue by Late", the 19-minute ambient track that closed Sorry About the Flowers, might have seen this coming.Azar is structured around four electronics-heavy instrumental movements spread across the album, what we might collectively call the "Azar Suite". "Azar One", with its warm, impressionist tonal swaths eventually given shape by steady march drumming, suggests Explosions in the Sky gone Pure Moods, shot through with just the slightest touch (no pun intended) of Fennesz. "Two" takes the main theme into more delicate, twilit territory, and "Three" introduces tape manipulation chatter, while "Four", which begins as somber undersea waltz as performed on some phantom player piano, only turns more gloomily nostalgic with the introduction of strings. Taken together the suite conjures some pretty big, cinematic imagery-- too big, as it turns out, for the still-modest indie pop in between. See, the problem here, and what makes Azar a more satisfying listen in parts than as a whole, is the rather epic disconnect between the "Azar" bits and the seven actual songs that comprise the blood and guts of the album. Take "Young Master Sunshine" as an example: the track sports an Elephant 6-esque title and comes in a pretty package, with an elegant swaying tempo and a horn- and string-saturated outro reminiscent of Okkervil River, but is ultimately sunk by a chorus-- constructed of slight variations on the line "It's not enough/ But sometimes it's more than enough"-- too bland and ambiguous to leave much of an impression. It's not for want of trying; while Karolyn Troupe's viola-playing anchored most of the tracks on Sorry, here it's almost an afterthought amid a sound rich with horns, woodwinds, percussion, and atmospheric flourishes. Yet more often than not the grand arrangements tend to smear together rather than punctuate specific moments, and overall these more cautiously optimistic tracks lack the weight of their determinedly melancholy counterparts on Flowers. In short, this is still a small band with some big ideas....full text |
| Awmusic |
| Venice Is Sinking came to my attention some years ago with their first release, Sorry About the Flowers, a charming, symphonic gem of a pop album that, while slightly underdone and rough around the edges, showcased the band’s wealth of passion and potential. Three years later, after a long and laborious recording process, that passion has been channeled and the potential realized. AZAR does the seemingly impossible: the band has created a lushly orchestrated and grandiose chamber pop opus without any bullshit. And for an album interspersed with four orchestral instrumental interludes and each bearing the album’s title, that is one hell of an accomplishment....full text |
| Theredalert |
| Slow drift of guitar creeps up with the volume, and I’m immediately thinking of Low, but with a more orchestral swing. This Athens, GA quintet creates a moody melancholic world that just fills you up with its delicate touch. Sparse, but not too sparse, Daniel Lawson and Karolyn Troupes mix and mingle their vocals like Christmas lights on a perfect tree. Lucas Jensen provides the steady but open drumbeats, which kind of hit like Flaming Lips against the dreamy pop swirls of instrumentation. There are subtle Flaming Lipped touches on the vocals as well. Occasional hints of light fuzz fall across some of the songs, along with those enchanting vocals and graceful lines of keyboards, from the Rhodes to the Wurlitzer to your average piano. Each piece fitting together without leaving anything out, but at the same time, never any more than is needed. ...full text |
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