Review Summary: Aesthetically fascinating but not quite perfect, Revisionist is nevertheless a satisfying close to Fritch's colossal project.
The fact William Ryan Fritch released 11 albums, consisting of over 110 tracks in total, in less than a year should give the impression that he is not interested in keeping things small. As the final album of his monumental series on Lost Tribe Sound,
Revisionist can be purchased on 140g vinyl with an art book built into the sleeve courtesy of João Raus. Again, he doesn't keep things small.
And then there's the music: a barely-restrained cacophony of not-quite identifiable samples, layered strings, woodwind, guitar, percussion and contrasting falsetto. It is definitely not small. Folk warmth and classical sensibility fold into the colossal bulk of eccentricity required to make the kind of music planet-sized gods wake up to: loud, powerful, but not without sensitivity. Fritch's music can be gentle, but never delicate. If he wants to tell someone he loves them I imagine it involves a full symphony orchestra and an elephant.
The unique aesthetic of his music comes from the way it was recorded.
Revisionist, and in fact the whole 11 album series, was recorded in a barn cluttered with any instrument Fritch could lay his experimenting hands on. Cellos, other strings, keys and percussion are played competently, when they can be singled out enough for you to be able to tell, but the charm comes from a less conventional forms of creating noise. In the promotional interview on bandcamp, Fritch demonstrated this by slamming into a bank of keyboards and discarded instruments: explaining that this is the source of the crunch giving his percussion so much weight.
Fritch's chosen recording space gives his music a sound both gigantic and formless. Every explosion of instrumentation, and there are enough explosions of instrumentation to pen Fritch as a more tasteful and experimental audio counterpart to Michael Bay, brings with it a lingering structure of reverberation and post-echo shimmer. Guitar leads, woodwind, strings and god knows what else lose their individual identities in the gelatinous, unstoppable force of sound.
And with that comes the drawback to Fritch's project.
Revisionist is aesthetically fascinating and the synthesis of his music is a large contributor to this, but it becomes incredibly difficult to crack into. Their is simply no space to squeeze between the individual sounds; so in mixing together such a variation of noise Fritch actually gives us a soundscape that is fairly restricted. This was much more evident in earlier albums in the series, noticeably
Leave Me Like You Found Me, which is why this criticism is mostly levelled at 'Still': an Esme Patterson collaboration using the instrumental 'A Still Turning Point in this World' from that album. However, the rest of
Revisionist fails to dodge it completely, particularly in the title track and towards the end of 'In Denial'.
Fritch walks a fine line, because when he gets his aesthetic to click it mesmerises. The Benoit Pioulard-produced 'Winds' rises from a hushed whisper to a flurry of strings: making the most of Fritch's busy palette by giving each instrument a little more space to breath. 'Infant Sight' succeeds by being relatively stripped-back, with the first half led by Fritch's frail falsetto and the second dominated by brief, dramatic sweeps of warped violin, sombre cello and a light but effective use of percussion, before descending into a beautifully muddied whirl as all the parts sink together.
Taken as a whole,
Revisionist is an incredibly difficult album to get a grip on. On one hand, Fritch is creating a hugely impressive, novel kind of music and the album is the best stab at it since he began the series with
Emptied Animal. On the other,
Revisionist is far from perfect. There is a lingering sense that
more can be done; that there is
more to explore. In fact, if Fritch were to make an album on the same lines of 'Infant Light' and invited back Benoit Pioulard and DM Stith it would be his best yet. But seeing as
Revisionist is album number 11, it is looking increasingly unlikely that Fritch will ever completely perfect his own formula.
