High Places

The overall feel of High Places’ debut album is spongy, moist and mossy. Rather than stock bass and drums, Rob Barber’s unique beats consist of numerous, slight, organic layers of sound. The typical click-clacks of bedroom electronica are replaced with what could be a gamelan performer smacking the heck out of a barrel of water. That’s not to say the sampling of household objects such as mixing bowls is particularly new—years ago, an artist neighbor gave me a CD of his own audio clips of rubber bands and cat-litter containers—but Barber conjures hazy pictures of faraway lands from these thrift-store sources. So it’s better to forget what they are.

When the Brooklyn duo falters, as on “From Stardust to Sentience,” it falls into pat glitchtronic rhythms, which have been done to death in indie-electro circles. High Places are pleasing when they shuffle at a natural pace or dig into a microhook, as on “The Tree with the Lights in It.”

At times, High Places are just plain uncooperative: “A Field Guide” features an extra-clear, pretty vocal from Mary Pearson, yet Barber’s “Tomorrow Never Knows”–style backing seems designed to fight it. So the performers’ divergent backgrounds come as no surprise: Barber from punk and vocalist Pearson from studying the bassoon. Their best bet is to weave in and out of each other’s way, as they do on the Bollywood-bhangra-influenced “The Storm.”

Still, as unrefined and random as High Places can be, they’re promising and transporting. With modest means, the band wades into primordial ooze, evoking field recordings from an old Elektra compilation.

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