Cul de Sac: Leave the Noise

Cutting an album of purely instrumental music is -- unless you're Kenny G -- a move that'll maneuver an artist into the ghetto of marginalia. Even at its biggest, jazz is still commercial small potatoes, and the biggies in classical are the monks and the Three Tenors. Rock-based instrumental albums in particular are sheer novelty. Without vocals, rock is nude, incomplete -- which is why so few purely instrumental bands (surf music aside) do anything of note. Last Exit, Blind Idiot God, MX-80, and Painkiller (and Concussion Ensemble here in Boston) have made the aesthetic gamble and come up winners, but there's always that tendency to hack up a thunderous racket when the going gets tough, to ride roughshod over the bumpy trails of chaos.

Local outfit Cul de Sac, on their new China Gate (Thirsty Ear), are more conservative and subtle, which raises expectations and doubles the workload. Lacking the cavalry charge of distortion, feedback, and into-the-red power moves, they leave a lot of open space to be filled. It's not that they eschew noise as an unclean element -- there's plenty of squall from the guitars and keyboards in spots, and there are definite moments of hyper-dense ensemble cohesion. But more often than not these come as climaxes and momentum creators instead of standard operating procedures.

The band's collective listening habits are pretty easy to crack: Krautrock from Can, Faust, and Neu; MX-80; Karlheinz Stockhausen's electro-acoustic work; the Dead; Ennio Morricone; and a lesser melange of surf tunes, Pink Floyd, and free jazz. It's unlikely you'll find better building blocks, and the group keep a respectful distance from their roots; moments of outright plagiarism are few, manifesting themselves mostly in hints and approximations.

But the songs don't limit themselves to single-genre representations. "Sakhalin" starts with the muted bass/ringing treble of a surf riff and intones the Om of '60s kitsch-pop satori -- the glassy shimmer of a vocal choir -- before bombing the tune with a gnashingly spastic synth squeal. "Doldrums" works skittering guitar-ambiance lines into an almost cocktail-lounge groove (mercifully never quite achieving it). "James Coburn" lets the veins of Cul de Sac's influence show through with its Krautrock expansiveness and rhythmic pulse.

Some of the best moments on this fine CD are the non-song excursions of "Hemispheric Events Command," "Columber," and the coda, "Utopia Parkway." The first is a spacy evocation of a quick cruise down an open Midwest highway. The second has some great electro-acoustic textured bursts, and the guitar on "Utopia" floats through a beautiful patch of hazy melodicism.

China Gate isn't an album that rips out of the speakers and goes for the throat; it lays back, does its thing, and demands you take a few steps toward it. It may not possess ass-shaking grooves, and as background noise it's a bust, but careful study of this CD in moments of repose might change some of your downer nights for the better.

-- Jonathan Dixon

(Cul de Sac play a CD-release party downstairs at the Middle East next Thursday, June 27.)