Release Date: April 25, 2012
Good Night & Good Morning are a small and soft-spoken band from Chicago. Their newest album, Narrowing Type, is as close to a masterpiece as a few guys in their 20s can get.
The album is seven songs long and clocks in at 42 minutes. Narrowing Type is filled with songs that are pure ambience and then the more droney instrumental songs. Both of these play to the band’s talents. There is a deeply personal and intimate touch that comes from both the purely instrumental tracks as well as the ones with lyrics.
The vocal melodies are so natural and flow with the music that they feel more like an instrument. The highlight of the album is the two tracks that are paired together, “Median I” and “Median II.” The first is a dreamy interlude that cascades into ripples of reverb that blend right into “Median II” that feeds off waves from bands like My Bloody Valentine, while the rest of the song sounds like Sigur Ros producing the XX. These songs give the listener more to grab onto and are where the replay value of this album comes from.
The ambient songs are pretty, but at a certain point they sound like any other ambient track from any other artist. These tracks flush out the album as a whole and bring it full circle as a piece of art. The real gems are the songs like “Philadelphia” that seem to draw influence from bands like Atlas Sound and the instrumental organization of a very slowed down Explosions in the Sky.
Though the entire album as a whole is a great piece of music and art, it is geared primarily towards people that are heavily into noise and ambience in the vein of Brian Eno.
Most of the album consists of noises that sound like electronics slowly taking their last breaths. Sometimes there are guitar loops that trickle in and out of and in between songs while layered underneath walls and waves of distortion and fuzz.
Though Good Night & Good Morning aren’t inventing a new genre or doing anything extremely revolutionary, there is a certain freshness to their songs that can’t be denied. In an era where people can download an album faster than they can listen to it and have ten years worth of audio on their hard drive when they are twenty-years-old, it’s nice to see there are still bands who appreciate the art of making music.
It isn’t just a gimmick for Good Night & Good Morning or an excuse to get girls or get drunk. The songs on Narrowing Types are powerful songs that will move you and stick with you after you listen to them. It seems that instead of trying to be the most catchy song of the week Good Night & Good Morning are trying to catch listener’s attention with well-crafted music that actually means something and goes beyond your typical four chord songs about relationships and breaking-up.
However some of the songs on Narrowing Types very well might be about relationships and break-ups, but the listener can draw so much more out from these songs than your average indie-rock band you find on the internet.
Good Night & Good Morning- Narrowing Types Tracklist:
- “Jill”
- “Philadelphia”
- “Key Studies”
- “Median I”
- “Median II”
- “Japanese Thread”
- “Abroad & Neutral”
