Reviews
Solidarity: Sublime in its artistry, but not at all inaccessible or unpleasant in surface aesthetics,
Solidarity is a warm, engaging whirlwind that gets better with every listen; one of those rare albums which truly sounds as exciting the fifth time as it did the first.
In a word: Prime Grade A+ —JJ Koczan, The Aquarian collaboration
with Bowen McCauley Dance: —Pamela Squires, The Washington Post Ambient
Metals: —Stein Haukland, Ink 19 Structure: —from DEAD
ANGEL, Issue #42 Sustain: —Mark Jenkins,
The Washington Post If, like me, you thought that judging from what you'd
heard about them, Tone must the be most god-awful wankfest you could ever hear,
well, consider yourself corrected. From the brilliant, Sisters-like opener "Tag",
to the drone-fest "Lockheed", to the free jazz of the closer "Quartz",
this record is 50 minutes of jaw-dropping tunes, augmented by the tasteful production
of Robert Poss of Band of Susans. I could fill up space with expletives and
hyperbole (as I've been known to do), but I'll stop here and leave you scratching
your head all the way to the record store. —RS, Snackcake 1.5 There's a real eloquence and honesty to instrumental
group Tone: neither rarefied nor self-consciously "hip," this DC eight-piece
give rise to music that is inviting and evocative… Tone are interested
in the organic possibilities of guitar sounds. Their method is deceptively simple,
often involving five or six guitarists paraphrasing one another, layering repeating
chords and letting them echo and reverberate (merely repetitive to some, a mantra
to others). The album opens with the surfy, circular riffs of "Tag,"
then abruptly switches gears for "Lo," a hypnotic lock-groove lullaby.
The frenzied pace of "Lockheed" is followed nicely by the slower,
strolling "Augmented," which breaks briefly out of its reserve only
to resume its stately pace. "Secret Satellite" and "Fate"
revisit the spy themes of yesteryear (if IPR label-mates Scenic take on Ennio
Morricone, then Tone take on John Barry). The record winds down with the introspective
"Nostalgia and Remorse." Tone call themselves a guitar ensemble, and
it's an apt description: their finely honed, single-minded pursuit of a groove
results in an intricate variety of resonant textures. —Andrea Feldman, Puncture
#38 Build: —from DEAD ANGEL, issue
#31
...The most ear-catching was "Telemetry,"
an ensemble work with one long solo set to a wall of earsplitting electronic
music by the musical group Tone. The dancers' attire evokes whips and chains and
sadomasochism. Both the dancers onstage and the musicians in the pit thump,
twang and stomp with disciplined ferocity. The music is intentionally
repetitious melodically and is layered with lots of electric guitars and heavy
percussion. The amplification was so loud that the music was painful. Yet even
with one's head feeling thick from the pounding, the dancing was electrifying.
Bowen McCauley let her hair down, dipped into her unconscious and pulled out
surprise after surprise. This stylish, in-your-face work is like looking into
Cinderella's dark side or Peter Rabbit's sex life...
Ambient Metals is surely Tone's most crafted, delicately controlled album so
far, a massive and majestic monument to the somewhat surprising genius of intellectual
rock instrumentals. The oft-mentioned Glenn Branca is certainly a vital influence
on their guitar-driven hardcore sound, but equally important is Fugazi's insight
that you can be both punk and clever at the same time. "Steppe" and
"Southpaw" represent the finest moments on the disc: adventurous,
biting tracks where pummeling repetition is as enticing as it is maniacally
arresting. "Sticks," on the other hand, merely translates dilettante
post-rock into hypnotic hardcore territory, convincingly demonstrating that
everything on here's not equally interesting. For the most part, Ambient Metals
will grab you by your throat and pull you in, making sure you don't leave unmoved.
It's not for everyone, but no one can deny that Ambient Metals is one of the
year's most unique sounding albums, instrumental or otherwise.
… Here they refine their sound even further, adding actual orchestra instruments
(French horn, cello, trombone, etc.) to round out the guitar sound, and stacking
the guitars up instead of spreading them out. (The choice of Robert Poss [as
producer], former guitarist/leader of Band of Susans, may have a lot to do with
this.) …Imagine Band of Susans with an interest in spaghetti westerns as
opposed to rock and roll, or perhaps a more intensely rhythmic version of godspeedyoublackemperor!,
or a modern counterpart to Rhys Chatham around the era of Die Donnergötter,
and the big picture begins to come into focus. Now imagine, on this album, that
the band itself is working primarily as one giant rhythm instrument and the
orchestral instruments are overlaid to provide tonal color and melody...It's
worth noting that Tone's attention to structure and detail, already well-developed,
has improved even more with this album, and the addition of orchestral elements
is an excellent development. This may be their best album yet… and like
all of their releases, it sounds brilliant, capturing a wide range of tones
and overtones and clearly capturing all the different guitars, no mean feat
with this many instruments in the mix. Add in the really appealing packaging
and you have a release that ought to throw the average Dischord fan for a loop...
The first full album by Tone is titled Sustain, which suggests guitar
music composed entirely of rippling overtones. This D.C. octet doesn't ignore
the overtones-no band with six electric guitarists could-but its music moves
much faster than the compositions of Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham, the New York
composers who pioneered massed guitar ensembles... The band (which includes
former members of Government Issue and the Teen Idles) always sounds like it's
going somewhere, even if it's only in circles. From the Velvets-like vamp of
"Lo" to the surf-music locomotion of "Fate," Tone does more
than simply sustain. It moves.
This is a swell EP by an equally swell band… Their fondness for twangy
sound and dry, arid song structures result in a distinctly western feel, especially
on "Milhous" and (to a lesser degree) "Mr. Authority." Others
like "Theory" sound a bit more like, madly enough, Joy Division gone
surfing. All of them are built on the theory that you can never have enough
guitars, a truism that always worked for Glenn Branca and the Band of Susans…
the difference here is that their use of distortion is minimal, offering clean
guitar lines that only even hint at distortion just when the guitars all pile
up together.