Album Review: Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?

Here’s an opportunity to remind yourself why ears were invented. As prolific as they might be, Cleveland, Ohio outfit Emeralds are hard to pin down. According to Discogs.com, they operate a production line, churning out more than 30 releases in less than four years, including one on Thurston Moore’s imprint Ecstatic Peace!, yet of the two bands on MySpace I found with their name, they are neither. If Wikipedia is to be believed, their back catalogue consists of mainly cassette recordings and self-burnt CD-Rs, although their last effort was released in “floppy disk, mud and sunlight” formats. That might be a round-about way of explaining how out of place this sounds in the current musical landscape, being composed entirely of woozy instrumentals built up of oscillating loops that showcase an arsenal of dusty equipment last used to soundtrack episodes of Doctor Who in the mid-1970s.

More archaic than electronic, contemporary comparisons are hard to come by – Boards of Canada, maybe LCD Soundsystem in their most Germanic 45:33 mode, snatches of Holy Fuck, at a push, some of the stuff Animal Collective are playing with, if not quite fully committing to. Beyond that, you’re looking at a musical history of the early days of home computing woven into an aural blanket by the more brazen BBC Kraut-bent sound technicians of decades ago. But for all its unearthliness, there is something strangely familiar and comforting about it, sidestepping something that would otherwise be brutally inhuman and making this highly personal. For me, the closest match I can think of is the audio signature to an obscure documentary about beekeeping I randomly stumbled into once in New Zealand. That’s really clutching at straws.

This is exactly the sort of album that challenges the very concept of drawing a tangible critical discourse fashioned from written words out of a slab of noise. If that sounds like an excuse, it is, but only a bit. Does It Look Like I’m Here swells, gyrates, flows, pounds, judders, throbs and glistens to the point that verbs become meaningless. And every second pulls you deeper in, until a full-blown sensory overload seems inevitable. You’ll be scrubbing drips of your brain out of the carpet for the next week and you won’t even mind. A totally absorbing, possibly synaesthesia-inducing episode that will rattle your faculties to the core.