Advance Cassettes

The jump from whispery quiet to towering loud is a blunt tool, one that can mark a band’s musical ancestry. It’s a device Forget Cassettes used successfully on their debut Instruments of Action, an effective batch of post-rock spasms and squalls of distorted guitar. The danger, though, is that a band known for its quiet/loud dynamics can easily find itself painted into a corner, foot poised over the distortion pedal and nowhere to go, with quiet parts heard as obligatory setups for the rocking out that’s sure to follow. But on the newly released Salt, Forget Cassettes do more than avoid the proverbial corner; they manage to craft a surprising, varied and engaging album that succeeds at much more than spikes in volume. When drummer Doni Schroader left the band to tour with Austin amp-destroyers …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, singer-guitarist Beth Cameron was left with a handful of new songs and no outlet for them. Enter Aaron Ford of Sincerity Guild and Jay Leo Phillips of Apollo Up! The new lineup clicked immediately. According to Cameron, “The [first] day we played together, I said, ‘We’re writing a record.’ ” Over the next year, Salt began to take shape, with Ford not only rock-solid behind the kit but also adding flourishes of funk and jazz, and Phillips bringing new textural depth on bass, guitar and Rhodes. When drummer Doni Schroader left the band to tour with Austin amp-destroyers …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, singer-guitarist Beth Cameron was left with a handful of new songs and no outlet for them. Enter Aaron Ford of Sincerity Guild and Jay Leo Phillips of Apollo Up! The new lineup clicked immediately. According to Cameron, “The [first] day we played together, I said, ‘We’re writing a record.’ ” Over the next year, Salt began to take shape, with Ford not only rock-solid behind the kit but also adding flourishes of funk and jazz, and Phillips bringing new textural depth on bass, guitar and Rhodes. It’s an album that makes its living on the care and feeding of tension: between quiet and loud, yes, but also between melodicism and discord, bleakness and optimism. Cameron’s songs are much like the relationships they often describe: uneasy and changing, sometimes producing a sense of closure, sometimes not. These are tales of boundaries crossed or ill-defined, transgressions of trust and smoldering, unrequited loves. At times they are obliquely sung, with a perverse disregard for conventional melody; at other times they are graceful and poignant.   There are a few moments where Salt falls prey to its own artiness. For example, when Cameron hurriedly whispers “forever” (on “Nicholas”), it recalls the campy melodrama of those old commercials for Calvin Klein Obsession. But when the band hit their marks, which is most of the time, the results are memorable. Case in point: the dark, fulfilling “Lonely Does It” begins with a dirge-like riff that is downright Iommian and marches to a tribal tom-beat through two druggy, stricken verses: “Oh doggie it’s abandonment now / But I’ll come back for you,” Cameron sings in a heavy-lidded voice that is equal parts comeuppance and come-on.  As the song slowly builds, masterfully held in check by Ford’s precise, patient drumming, the tension accrues until it reaches the breaking point. The hoped-for guitar catharsis finally comes—but below a soaring, wordless falsetto chorus that’s as mesmerizing as it is unexpected. On “Patience, Beth Reprise,” you can hear Cameron’s voice nearly break as she struggles through the pain of her brother’s death, talking to herself, trying to get herself through it, one verse at a time. Finally, as glockenspiel gives way to a Mellotron whirling gently in the background, we hear a scratchy tape of two children laughing—an artifact of happier times—and Cameron finds her mantra: “I know / it hurts / but good god girl / get up and fight for it.” As her bandmates fall into a rhythm behind her, again and again she repeats these lines, a little stronger and braver each time. We often feel silenced by our suffering, but Cameron knows it can’t stay quiet. Guitar slung over her shoulder and a bituminous pain in her heart, she sings: “Don’t shut it up / just let it out / Grief is what if not loud?”