There’s an unsettling vibe to the first thirty-five seconds of “Elephant Park,” the opening track in Foley Age by Bloom’s Taxonomy, but it has almost nothing to do with the melody forming in this introduction. The pace of the music as it unfolds is tension-inducing beyond compare, and with every passing moment it feels like the synths are swelling to an incomprehensible size soon too big for the speakers they’re occupying. Just when everything feels as though it’s going to collapse on us, Bloom’s Taxonomy pulls back a bit – enhancing a catharsis we wouldn’t have even picked up on were it not for the rigidity of the rhythm. “Imaginary Angles” and “Obrigada Nada” will pick up where this song leaves off, but in terms of perfect openers, “Elephant Park” is as good as it gets.
It isn’t until we’ve hit the fourth track in Foley Age, titled “Mount Bromo,” that the industrial elements in the music are properly incorporated with the overt jazziness of the setting, ultimately yielding something both danceable and highly surreal. If you were thinking that this record was going to be a single-dimension drone or some other form of streamlined ambience, you’re going to be in for quite a surprise by the time you get to this song and its counterpart in “Locked In,” one of my favorite tracks on the record. “Locked In” pushes things in more of a psychedelic direction, but carefully pays mind to the fragile edging on the synths as to maintain a crisp sound even in the strangest of melodic lashings.
“Tumbleweed Tornado” is, without question, the most appropriately-titled song here, but it doesn’t bludgeon us with any over the top violence at all. This is one of the only times we hear a vocal from Bloom’s Taxonomy, and though it’s buried in ambient texture and not conveying any lyrical continuity at all, it’s still an essential part of the harmony in this track just the same. “Pluvius” gets us back on the jazzy side of the spectrum only to drop off and into the sonic ethers when “Earthrise” subtly erupts from the shadows. Turning back at this point is futile; the quest is about to reach its climax, and anyone in close proximity to the music can feel it.
A distant and fractured ballad in “Cosmic Village of the Jaguars” imports some pop aesthetics as it prepares us for the concluding song in Foley Age, the title track, but it doesn’t feel like a mere segue piece (nothing here does). The final four and a half minutes of the LP play out like an epilogue to what the previous nine songs pieced together, and it’s in the last thirty seconds that warmth finally overtakes the cold darkness of the synths in a brief – but unforgettable – twist of sonic fate. The haunting disappearance of the music into the bittersweet silence is as provocative as any moment we’ve just experienced, but resisting the urge to go back and listen to this album all over again frequently proves too great for even the most discriminating of critics. In short, Foley Age is a triumph for Bloom’s Taxonomy and anyone who loves acerbic experimental music.
Jodi Marxbury