Circulatory System: "This Morning (We Remembered Everything)"

Eight years is a long time. The newest generation of self-styled hipsters were still in short pants during the end of Elephant 6’s heyday, and so Signal Morning feels a lot more like a reunion than the end of a hiatus—less of a continuation than a re-imagining. Mastering uncertainties notwithstanding, the precision wall-of-sound orchestration from the last Olivia Tremor Control album and the first Circulatory System is submerged here on “This Morning (We Remembered Everything)” under cranky guitar, like an early-nineties demo run wild, stampeding over the strings and mellotronic keys through unpredictable pauses and bursts of static.

But for all that this new direction misses (the pop precision of Dusk at Cubist Castle or the multitrack rabbitholes of Will Hart’s later records with both bands) there’s something undeniable, even irresistible, about it all the same. When the song pauses for a reverberating chug and Hart murmuring, “So very far away / So very far away,” before revving back to that from which it came, you remember everything (the absorbing layers, the mysterious fuzz, the dead-cool whisper/rasp) that made his branch of Elephant 6 beguiling enough to keep everyone’s attention for a quiet (at least in retrospect) decade. And then at one point in the song some friends shout along as Hart goes on about “a world somewhere that’s a little bit different.” Like the best musical reunions, “This Morning” repurposes Circulatory System’s primordial pop into forms curiouser and curiouser, sustaining just enough of a balance between enigma and familiar pleasure to keep us waiting for however long it takes until we can get together and remember all over again.