American Analog Set: Know By Heart

The Texas hypno-rockers in American Analog Set were once masters of the art of the long and lazy, pushing their songs routinely past the six- or even eight-minute mark with a hum and drone borrowed partly from Stereolab, partly from The Velvet Underground, and partly from the distant, unidentifiable sounds that roll across barren Southwestern plains. But by its third record, 1999's The Golden Band, AmAnSet had begun to tighten up its tracks and pick up the pace, and on its fourth album, Know By Heart, the band's methodology has been fully inverted. The songs are still based on trancelike repetition, but they're brisker and more uptempo. Beginning with a harp-like strum and skipping drums on the opening track "Punk As Fuck," AmAnSet bustles through 12 songs in 40 minutes, hitting a near-magical stride; the group weaves jittery guitar lines around dreamy vocals, letting the tinkle of the organ and the brush-heavy percussion carry the melodic and structural weight of the songs' reveries. Compressing the arrangements has upped their force, giving "The Only One" and "The Kindness Of Strangers" the impact of a road sign on a vacant stretch of highway, full of wonder and promise. Stronger still are the songs that restore a little spaciousness to the instrumentation, like the reverberating "The Postman"—a wistful character sketch that employs echoing spareness to emphasize the aches of a man who walks through strange neighborhoods on quiet mornings, delivering the mail. But Know By Heart's truest statement of purpose may be "Gone To Earth," a jaunty three-minute version of a song that was almost three times that length on the group's debut album. In its original form, the track was one of AmAnSet's most haunting and transporting, composed of suspended notes that shattered the stillness like telegraph signals; the new version rearranges its predecessor's more memorable elements, converting them into toe-tapping pop music. That pretty much defines what American Analog Set has become. Its music is still mood-altering, but now the medicine comes in a flavorful, chewable tablets.