Pan American - Quiet City (2004)

It's been more than three years since the last Labradford album with no word of a new release. No worries, though. I imagine this fanbase is a patient lot. To enjoy Labradford you have to be willing to sit still, listen deeply, enjoy the moment, and wait for subtle changes that wind up being quite meaningful when stacked one atop the other.

Labradford's Mark Nelson, who records as Pan American, has kept busy with music since 2001's excellent fixed:content. His third solo album, The River Made No Sound, was released in 2002, and he now returns with a record whose title merits a nomination in the 2004 Truth in Advertising award: Quiet City. While the first three records moved progressively toward beats, loops, and laptop-forged glitches, Quiet City sounds very much like where we last left Labradford. Gone are the dub processes and dabbles in microscopic dance music. There is hardly a loop on the record, there's all sort of guitar, and Nelson has recruited players to assist on upright bass (Charles Kim), drums (Steven Hess) and horns (David Max Crawford). Where The River Made No Sound was often cold and brittle, Quiet City is like a warm breeze crawling in through an open window.

An overall shift in sound toward more trad-instrument territory is evident, but a select few tracks on Quiet City are reminiscent of Pan American of old. The nine-minute "Wing" is a heavily electronic drone piece, with an unsteady wavering tone surrounded by glitches and static and the occasional presence of noisily recorded conga drums. "Shining Book" adds unintelligible whispers by Nelson to the moody ambient electronic stew. These less specific drift pieces blend easily with the more fleshed-out and layered tracks, but the most intense moments of Quiet City are direct in the manner of great film music. "Het Volk", for example, is like a prime cut from John Barry's Body Heat score, as a tense repeating keyboard pattern combines with Crawford's flugelhorn to suggest sweat, darkness, contemplation, and a hint of danger. "Inside Elevation", with its acoustic guitar and melodica floating above a buried rumble of bass drone, captures the veiled desert drama of Paris, Texas.

The economical guitar work throughout the record is excellent, and ultimately is at the core of what makes Quiet City such an evocative record. Both "Skylight" and "Lights on the Water" are built around the kind of gorgeously reverberating guitar that Nelson long ago mastered, with the guitar/amp interface tweaked to noir perfection. "Lights of Little Towns" closes the album on an up note, with simple plucked acoustic guitar dueling with a processed electric and a bowed cymbal to produce a mood of muted optimism laced with dignity, something like a more orderly and precise dirge by the Tren Brothers. Thus ends a deceptively powerful album that sounds so good in the background that it's easy to overlook how well it's executed. With any luck, Labradford will return to the studio soon, but in the interim Quiet City is plenty to hold us over.