L’altra’s lap-pop micro landscapes are intricately detailed in a genre that's often precious and diminutive.
L'Altra settle small tracts of land and make them feel large and lived-in. Their lap-pop micro landscapes are intricately detailed, beaming with uncharacteristic expansiveness in a genre that's often precious and diminutive. Different Days, the band's first album in three years, is verily a headphones record. No strangers to hard panning, L'Altra are cleanly and delicately mixed; on Different Days, Rhodes pianos, wobbly-legged guitars, and sluicing strings roam freely within seemingly infinite dreamspace.
Listeners familiar with the Notwist, Ms. John Soda, and Psapp are likely to hear strains of those bands, as well as more ambient, texture-oriented groups likes Hood and Bark Psychosis. But unlike Hood, who prefer a consolidated, unified approach, L'Altra are more inscrutable. Their songs are heavily fragmented, stitching together melody from seemingly arbitrary sources. And, hailing from Chicago, they're above all less European; L'Altra may rely on computers, but Different Days aches with a punchy midwestern twang, from the power line-shaded prairie captured on the album's cover to the tremolo-juiced guitars and bucolic strings contained within.
Curiously, Amazon.com suggests pairing Different Days with Keren Ann's sensational 2003 album, Not Going Anywhere. Aesthetically, the albums have little in common other than spindly female vocal. But like Keren Ann, L'Altra make music that's almost too soft to matter, with an alluring, slightly sexual pull. Their songs burst open upon inspection; you must first shrink to their size, but once you do, you'll probably want to stick around for awhile.
Opener "Sleepless Night" starts with a chorus of ringing telephones-- chopped, muted, and processed-- and slowly incorporates acoustic elements as it wiggles into focus. "It Follows Me Around", an easy standout, is more immediate: The track opens with an alighting guitar loop, pinioned by ringing bell tones, and blossoms early, reserving only a grandiloquent post-breakdown crescendo. By and large, the album avoids glitch-kitsch, preferring a more natural form of fracture. When the title track opens with a chopped breathy beat, it's quickly reinforced by unobstructed vocals and Rhodes piano.
Different Days is notable for its consistency; a collection of primarily lovelorn ballads, each song flickers with detail while retaining many common characteristics. Polymath Lindsay Anderson (she's collaborated with Telefon Tel Aviv, Slicker, and Will Oldham) and Joseph Costa divvy up the vocal sheet, seldom locking in harmony. On "So Surprise", however, they join together, rendering an a cappella chorus-- "If you leave, right back to me/ Like every man, you don't matter/ To every man you don't matter"-- poignant through its implicit gender ironies. And though Different Days is full of sodden slow jams, L'Altra aren't entirely incapable of levity: Closing instrumental "A Day Between" packs its suitcase and steals away on a beam of hope, capping this weighty collection with a pounding new-new-wave beat that would make even Braxe and Falke blush.
-Pitchfork 2012
