It All Falls Apart by The Sight Below
LABEL: Ghostly International  |||  RELEASE: April 6, 2010

It's fitting that Rafeal Irisarri hails from Seattle.

Like the city itself, the music Irisarri releases under the moniker of “The Sight Below” is dark, evocative, and frequently beautiful, and It All Falls Apart stands as his best and most confident work yet.

Created in collaboration with former Slowdive drummer Simon Scott, It All Falls Apart abandons the slight techno leanings of his earlier releases and fully embraces the sort of classically influenced ambient shoe-gaze he seemed to have always been drifting towards.

Swirling masses of sounds and notes ebb and flow, sometimes grounded and tethered by simple, pounding percussion, but more often then not let loose to cascade on their own. Rarely is any one instrument discernible—a strummed chord here, a hard picked note there—with The Sight Below content to let their droning wall of sound do the talking.

Probably most surprising about the album is the cover of Joy Divisions “New Dawn Fades” that arise out of nowhere in the latter half. Stripped down to it's barest simple melody and enveloped by a mass of reverb, with tortured vocals by Jesy Fortino of Tiny Vipers, this is not only one of the best Joy Division covers I've ever heard, but manages to be more haunting then the original, and I do not say that lightly.

Ultimately, It All Falls Apart is the sort of masterful album that you can quite easily lose yourself in, but like the best of ambient work, some tiny detail draws you out of your reverie and you realize you are in the presence of something beautiful.


REVIEWED BY MAT LINDENBERG
MAT'S FAVORITE TRACKS: “New Dawn Fades” • “Stagger” • “Through The Gaps In The Land”
Read more from Mat on his blog, Everything is Unnecessary