Send "THE CIRCULATORY SYSTEM " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Tinymixtapes |
 “Do you think we can lift the shadow? No…” Will Cullen Hart sings on Signal Morning’s central axis “Round Again.” The decaying aural ellipsis felt hanging in the aether marks the dusky road of the album’s fist half. This is dark stuff, darker than our main man Hart is known for.It’s been eight years since the former Olivia Tremor Control mastermind first and last convened his coven to enliven his musical dreamscapes as Circulatory System. Even then, the ragtag group of Elephant 6 alumni was heading away from OTC’s underground hit formula of the Zombies-do-musique-concrète. Instead, Circulatory System’s eponymous debut rolled the mid-60s good vibes onwards into a freaky-deaky 1970 Manson-and-mantra cultish appeal amidst the garden of fuzzy delights. But now they sound more like the paranoid vampire hunters of Marvel’s 70s Tomb of Dracula series. Excepting perhaps the weirdest corners of The White Album, the OTC-era late-period Beatles comparisons can go out the bathroom window for good. A droning Silver Apples chug-along takes their place from opening track on, sort of minimal but definitely sinister. This is appealing if you’re geared up for a little gloom, Phil Elverum style, an intriguing shady turnoff on the stylistic lane that produces a fair few individual standouts like “Round Again” and “Particle Parades.” But like any solid Elephant 6 album, it’s really meant to be taken as a whole....full text |
| 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....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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