Envelopes Here Comes the Wind by: Steve Scully Tue:08-Apr-08 Label: Brille Year: 2008 WB rating 65 out of 100

The product of nine months’ worth of self-imposed rusticity, Envelopes’ second record is a trip through musical landscapes the likes of which Architecture in Helsinki call home. This band of French and Swedish characters, who all now call the UK home, spent the best part of a year in the English countryside writing and recording Here Comes the Wind.

Now, it’s all well and good to do something rather eccentric like this – recently we heard the fruits of Bon Iver’s masochistic relocation, and we all know how successful Arcade Fire’s little church outing was – but really, at the base of it all, you need the songs in the first place. What’s so striking about this record is that it is entirely removed from its created context: Here Comes the Wind sounds nothing like an English countryside album. Instead, this is a heavily-produced, incredibly shiny and noisy effort, with little grace or subtlety. But who says that’s a bad thing?

Album opener, ‘Party’, is the trend-setter. Switching around the vocal burden mid-song, the band are all riffs, pounding bass lines and nice little lyrical aphorisms (“Once upon a time I was falling in love/ Now I’m only falling apart/ Totally fucked from the start”), approaching the music with all-out enthusiasm. Similarly, ‘Freejazz’ is centred on a fantastic bass line and Audrey Pic’s cute little French-accented nonsense vocals, creating an affable portrait of the group if nothing else.

With Martin Karlsson’s obvious talent on bass guitar, a great deal of the groove in the ‘filler’ tracks like ‘Heaven’ is based on his playing. In ‘Heaven’, you get the sense that the process of building on these rhythms and chord progressions is rather ad hoc. Too often, such parts sound little more than pottering-about on guitar, which all add up to a three-and-a-half minute song that could easily have been a punchier two-minute number.

On the other hand, there are tracks like ‘Boat’ – in substance, a painful little ditty, baring all of Pic’s flaws as a vocalist – in which there is no flair, only simplicity in terms of song-structure. Nonetheless, it stands as one example of Envelope’s ability to build on rather mundane concepts to create something at least relatively interesting.

The album highlight, arguably one of the more ingenious music moments of the year so far, comes in ‘Put On Hold’. The track itself is set to a monotonous, repetitious electro-beat, in substance unremarkable, but the use of auto-tune and pitch-control effects on Pic’s vocals to create the melody is superbly executed.

Here Comes the Wind is an album that pulls you both ways. You can either be really in the mood, and just quiver in adoration of the band’s exuberant, multi-faceted approach to what are, on paper, painfully one-dimensional creations. In practice, however, Envelopes manage to fill out the basics of the songwriting and build upon their limitations (self-inflicted limitations they may be) to create songs that sound more complex than they actually are. It’s an impressive end result – sonically flawless apart from the odd vocal glitch – but the songwriting depth remains questionable.