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| Pitchfork |
 The Orange Twin Conservation Community, the Athens, Ga., artists' colony which serves as the de facto Elephant Six compound, might as well be the Acropolis. Elephant Six effectively closed shop in 2002 and many of its flagship acts appear to have dropped off the radar. Granted, it seems Robert Schneider will never stop wringing giddiness out of the Apples in Stereo and one-time second-tier player Kevin Barnes has found a highly rewarding, well-deserved second-wind with his long-lived group of Montreal. But let's not forget that the whole effort began on the backs of childhood chums Schneider, Jeff Mangum, Bill Doss, and gregarious ringleader Will Cullen Hart. In this decade, Hart has dealt with a life-changing diagnosis, so it's a happy surprise that his new Signal Morning saw completion at all.In the Golden Age of the lo-fi 90s, Schneider indulged his Beach Boys fetish in the Apples and Mangum sculpted his Dylan insecurities into the now mythic Neutral Milk Hotel, while Hart swashbuckled with Doss a Zorro Z (or Psychedelic P) across the prevailing rock sphere with the Olivia Tremor Control. Closer to Hart's sensibilities was his subsequent project Circulatory System, a more serene group largely composed of the same OTC players, minus co-collaborator Bill Doss, which focused on some of the lusher and more experiment-laden textures often found near the stumbletine end of an Olivia Tremor Control record. But following the celebrated self-titled debut and a CD-R, Circulatory System took seven mysterious years off, the only noise being made by an Olivia Tremor Control reunion mini-tour. In late 2008, Hart revealed that one reason for the layoff was his struggle with the diagnosis and symptoms of multiple sclerosis. The disease had affected his mood and energy in recent years and continues to interrupt his artistic output, but careful management of the disease may allow Hart years of asymptomatic life, Thus the understandably delayed Signal Morning, the group's second proper full-length, enters an indie music culture quickly forgetting the indelible mark made by the Elephant 6. Nevermind that en vogue lo-fi groups like No Age, Wavves, and Deerhunter built their philosophy of bedroom experimentalism at least partly on Hart's gauze-wrapped template....full text |
| Leshake |
| Review: When the words “Elephant 6” pop up, I automatically think about Olivia Tremor Control. Dusk At Cubist Castle influenced me so much when I first got into indie, followed by a majority of the other bands that were on the notorious Elephant 6 label. Anyways, I consider Circulatory System as Olivia Tremor Control (plus/minus a couple members), and with the release of the debut self-titled album, I wasn’t disappointed at all. In my eyes, they have never put out a bad release, and until this day, they still don’t. I’ve been waiting for years for an OTC or Neutral Milk Hotel comeback, and I finally got it, and if I could give this any type of rating, it would be a “jizzfest 5000.” Wow, 2009 still continues to surprise me....full text |
| Citizendick |
| (Editor’s Note: There’s a lot going on at Citizen Dick world headquarters. As Kevin described on Sunday, three-fifths of us are prepping to return to school. At the time of this writing, I’m a mere 36 hours away from sitting through my building’s opening meeting. Two days after that, I’ve got students streaming into my classroom. To be perfectly honest, I’m thinking a little more about my third period algebra class than I am about Circulatory System. Add in the three hours I watched my aunt’s three-month old today, my need to take my garbage out, the second consecutive week of stupidly hot August weather and I’m in danger of not being on my A-game for the following review. Happily, Circulatory System’s Signal Mornings is an album that’s easy to praise; if it looks like this one is phoned in, it’s only because I’m both losing my mind and the record is really good. Hopefully that is both reasonably sensical and acceptable.) This is going to sound overblown. I’ve tried to find a way around it, given my general trend towards keeping the names of canonical records out of my mouth, but there’s really no better way to encapsulate Circulatory System’s upcoming sophomore record, Signal Mornings, than this: it sounds like the bastard child of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Kid A. No joke. Now I’m not about to take the position that it’s quite as good as either of those records (that would be heretical, potentially), but the record’s equal doses of high-period, classical psychedelia and tuneful electronic manipulation reek of those two records. There’s a clear line of fidgety business on the album, in that there’s always a slew of instrumentation blanketing the tracks; there’s not a lot of spareness here. Given that much of that instrumentation is bathed in a hazy bit of fuzz and distortion, it’s easy to see the influence of paisley-clad acid eaters. The flipside of that splash of swirling color is the deeply experimental use of electronics and tape manipulation. Many of the tracks lurch in one direction before hiccuping electronically and veering into computer-laced mayhem. To go back to the original comparison, imagine “Everything in its Right Place” played on top of “Fixing a Hole” and you’re getting close to the sound....full text |
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