Krakatoa: We Are the Rowboats

Contemporary listeners often only hear instrumental music in films, so it’s natural that it frequently evokes visual metaphors. While Krakatoa’s music, often heavy on violin, accordion, and piano, is reminiscent of the soundtracks of silent films, as it frequently shifts moods and tempos abruptly as if to accompany cinematic surprises, the more appropriate visual metaphor is to imagine the sound spread on a canvas, and to picture each song’s unfolding as the course one’s eye would take through an especially intricate landscape painting, certain sections rich with subtle variations in tone and others showing a command of different brushstrokes. Krakatoa are able to squeeze compelling passages from the many different genres they adopt, even unwieldy styles like smooth jazz, ska, electronica, and prog rock (at times they sound remarkably like forgotten English ’70s art-rockers Curved Air). Just as many landscape paintings are about the act of seeing itself, the processes by which the mind and the eye together break down space, so Krakatoa’s music is about listening, directing one’s attention to the fact of one’s attention, and how it is held and directed through time. So much detail is crammed into any one of their suite-like compositions that one must mind what one considers. It is impossible to listen to this as background music, it questions the very nature of it, of what aspects allow music to recede to the background, and which aspects hold it to the fore.

So, in short, this is overtly intellectual music — clearly performed by well-trained, well-practiced musicians — that verges on elitism, as the instrumental and compositional training that lies behind it is everywhere apparent. This is especially true of their cover of “Sabre Dance”, which is so loaded with technical reinterpretations that it sounds like an in-joke for music majors. The free verse that begins “Snoopy with Mohawk”, a blankly delivered string of non sequiturs hovering just on this side of incoherence, also seems like something listeners are intended not to get, or at best, they are supposed to get that they can’t get it, which is itself a tired gag of the avant-garde. Krakatoa project a sense that their music is smarter than you are, and you can either rise to the challenges it presents through its refusal to compromise to our expectations for commercial music (that it be uncomplicated, easy to consume, eager to uplift us with simplified emotional content or rote affirmations of our values) or you dismiss it as smug, pretentious bombast for the self-consciously arty.

The former seems the more appropriate response, though there is something finally trying, unnerving about their jittery impatience and restlessness with every groove they settle into. Although they often find very satisfactory grooves — grooves that most bands would settle into and repeat until an entire song is made — Krakatoa shrug them off as soon as they find them, moving ambitiously to something else. Despite the allusion in the album’s title, Krakatoa are like the anti-Kraftwerk, for the most part rejecting repetition and minimalism in favor of copious and endless variation, tinkering with compositional elements most bands would presume permanently fixed. The refusal to be complacent is laudable, but the end result is that several tracks on We Are the Rowboats (‘Telegraph”, “Cat’s Eye”) sound like all the bumper music played on NPR on any given day all run together in a rush. All the songs feel fully realized, but less skittish tracks like “Philadelcula” and “Rotor Blade” seem more successful. On these, the contrapuntal layers of instrumentation don’t seem like mere ostentation; here, they prove they can also use restraint as a strategy, which prevents the album from ultimately sounding like a mere technical tour de force.