80 :: Do Make Say Think

If, when the enigmatic Montreal label Constellation dropped Do Make Say Think’s & Yet & Yet in 2002, you weren’t just out of high school and about to tip into your 20s, leaning carefully into to the small freedoms and responsibilities of “adult life,” growing identities like snake skins and then immediately shedding, eating, and disgorging them, pulling away from old friends and plunging into the unsteady orbits of new ones, and feeling the malignant expansion of a dark corner of your consciousness that realized you didn’t know shit about anything, then I don’t know how you relate to this album. One of the perks, or possibly hazards, of instrumental music with such preverbal intensity is how perfectly it comes to serve as an accompanist to your own thoughts and experiences. & Yet & Yet is road trips and bad stoner philosophy and just getting used to drunkenness and sex being a regular part of life (late bloomer, ok?). All of the sadness and joy in this record rolls and surges irregularly, eschewing the unfortunate post-rock custom of travelling at an upwards 45 degree angle on a line graph where x = time and y = “intensity.” It pitches unexpectedly, throwing you off your feet and then pulling you back up, because whether or not your experiences match my sadly sheltered early adulthood, this is music that scores our lives. It’s landscapes and late nights and poking in the dirt with a stick, one of those universal sensations we’ve all felt.

Even relieved of all its associative weight, the thing is still plain gorgeous. Slow-moving at times, yes, but using moments of ennui as a gluey connector for peaks and chasms that otherwise just wouldn’t make sense. Each sound has a deliberate weight and tonal intensity. Woven synthwork sprawls over a gnarled acoustic scaffold, bass lines carve sinuous grooves into the framework, and every drum hit is a contribution to the interplay of elements rather than a rote pattern holding down a tired beat. Every noise is alive and curious. Whether it’s the warm synth, the slightly staggered snare hits of two drummers playing in perfect asynchrony, or a horn section wrapping itself around deep guitar chords, & Yet & Yet just sounds so good (let this album serve as a reminder that having well-tuned drums is so fucking worth it). Sandwiched between the album’s first six seconds of skidding static, which manage to capture a track’s worth of push and pull in and of themselves, and the beautifully dying hum at the end of closer “Anything For Now,” is sandwiched some of the best lights-off headphone fodder of the decade. Chew slowly.