The Rachel's: Handsome Highbrow

A genealogy of Louisville bands would look more inbred than a West Virginia trailer-park family tree. And it's from this enclave of relative isolation/insulation that the children of Squirrel Bait -- a lineage stretching from Slint, Palace Brothers, and Gastr del Sol to Rodan, June of '44, Retsin, and Sonora Pine -- have fashioned an increasingly intellectual-minded strain of post-hardcore indie rock. Enter the Rachel's (who play one of only five US tour dates at the Middle East this Friday), the Louisville indie-chamber ensemble who are either the culmination of this breed of culturally refined highbrow rock or ungainly pretentious self-indulgent elitists. Depends on who you're talking to.

With a revolving cast of 16 centering on core members Rachel Grimes (piano), Christian Frederickson (viola), and former Rodan member Jason Noble (bass, guitars, tape manipulations), the Rachel's 1995 debut LP, Handwriting (Quarterstick), was a fresh, inventive change of pace. Alternately rustic and bawdy, sophisticated and playful, and underscored with a gentle wave of gothic melancholy, it offered relatively uncomplicated music in adventurous instrumental settings. It was less convoluted and more sonically colorful than the languid, drone-noodle tangents favored by June of '44 and Sonora Pine, and it seemed perfectly situated in a moment relatively friendly to orchestral pop (Eric Matthews, Jeremy Egnick) and pomo-instrumental rock (Tortoise, Trans Am).

The Sea and the Bells, inspired by Pablo Neruda's novel of the same name, expands on the group's more serious side and so lacks much of Handwriting's ticklish abandon (last February, Grimes, Frederickson, and cellist Wendy Doyle released an interim disc, Music for Egon Schiele, the soundtrack for a dance-theater piece about the artist). This is, after all, is music to make you feel as if you'd grown up, and it has all the melodramatic affectations you might expect for indie rock subjected to sub-conservatory transcription.

But of course that's part of the appeal, and The Sea retains much of the band's original charm. On "Rhine & Courtesan," they elaborate on a simple, backbeat-driven indie-pop melody with barreling shots of timpani and piano and brusque swells of viola and cello. On "Voyage of Camille" they clear the air with heaving, pensive interludes of strings-only gloom; on "Tea Merchants" Grimes's Gastr del Sol-ish piano fragments slowly connect into a graceful cadence answered by Noble's vibes. On the album's second half, they stretch out into more cinematic, free-associative pieces. It's a spare and patient music, elegant and graceful, at its peaks wistful and majestic. Sure, it's a bit precious -- the nautical-themed sound-collage loops veer a little too close to the new-age bin, and the sonic pun in "The Sirens" (screeching strings not quite as otherworldy as Bernard Herrmann but easily as annoying as John Zorn) is kitsch masquerading as cleverness. But when they hit full stride -- for instance on the closing "His Eyes" -- the melody is subtle and buoyantly vivacious: soothing, not for lack of dissonance, but for the numbing, narcotic stillness the music leaves in its wake, like the sea swallowing up the distance behind ships passing in the night.

And pretensions aside, the Rachel's remain a unique proposition -- in their instrumentation, the exquisite letterpress packaging (Egon Schiele contains a booklet-sized biography of the artist; The Sea has a gorgeous 57-page book of poetry by Noble inspired by the music -- words about music about words, now that's precious), and the unorthodox subject matter. Here's hoping they stay afloat.

-- Carly Carioli

(The Rachel's play downstairs at the Middle East this Friday, October 18, with Rex and Victory at Sea.)