Album of the day: The Book of Knots – Garden of Fainting Stars

As we move towards the end of 2011, here’s a worthy record that we overlooked the first time around earlier this year.  Lovingly pinched from The Obelisk: The third installment in New York experimental rockers The Book of Knots’ alleged trilogy of concept albums, Garden of Fainting Stars, released by Ipecac Recordings, follows 2007’s Traineater and 2004’s Book of Knots (issued via Anti- and Arclight, respectively) and concludes the thematic string of “sea, land, air” the band undertook as its initial project.

Like its predecessors, Garden of Fainting Stars is rife with an extremely particular atmosphere and artistry, and probably has more in common sonically with the second album than the first, on which the core four-piece of Carla Kihlstedt (vocals and violin mostly; also of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Two-Foot Yard), Joel Hamilton (guitar and engineer), Tony Maimone (bass; also of Pere Ubu) and Matthais Bossi (drums, synth and occasional vocals; also of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) was still feeling its way into what has become over the subsequent (now) two albums The Book of Knots’ sound.

That sound, typified by invented instrumentation – Kihlstedt plays a “marxophone” on the track ‘Yeager’s Approach’ – and the integration of an array of guest performers, makes Garden of Fainting Stars a subtle but complex listen, and in just 40 minutes, The Book of Knots draws upon a Cold War sense of fear, American arrogance and wonder at modernity to cover a wide berth of moods and feelings, all the while remaining consistent in terms of songwriting and overall flow. As did Traineater from Book of Knots, Garden of Fainting Stars justifies every minute of the time it took to put it out.

Continue reading:  The Book of Knots, Garden of Fainting Stars: The Alchemy that Turns Moondust into Gunpowder | The Obelisk
Courtesy of JJ Koczan / The Obelisk

Tags: Album of the day, Carla Kihlstedt, Garden of Fainting Stars, Ipecac Recordings, JJ Koczan, Joel Hamilton, Matthais Bossi, The Book of Knots, The Obelisk, Tony Maimone

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2011 at 3:02 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.