I am not a fan of skinny people. The sight of bony, frail, brittle bodies, growing timidly out of two haggardly toothpicks is not one of my favorites. Nowadays, gauntness is an index of success, perhaps even a testament to one's superb qualities in meeting the social golden standard. As one loses weight, other beautiful bodily traits such as curves, posture and contours vanish; the 2D aesthetics had vanquished the real-world 3D beauty (in parenthetical statement: fuck you Mr. Cameron). However, in the metaphysical, skinny can have an occasional merit. Some might call it minimalism (yawn, Reich, yawn), but that is not the parallelism I am aiming at here. I want to discuss the issue of ambience, the ethereal atmosphere that has become a coveted adjective in popular music. In fact, the term is dispensed so easily (interestingly mostly in showgazing and its retard successor chill-wave and in subgenres of metal dominated by female vocals). I'm not talking about the genre ambient itself, either. I am talking about the ability to harness specific kind of delivery in order to create a feeling that transcends the music it builds upon. The most well-known example is Portishead who have perfected atmospheric music to an art form, in as much as it would take a listener 3 seconds to recognize immediately a Portishead track.
The aprons are a terrific example of how such atmospheric delivery can catapult a listening experience to lofty heights. This girl duo from Tel Aviv takes a garage mentality and turns it upside down: a combo of bass and drums (albeit the occasional glockenspiel and moog) that abandons its role as a rhythm section and trades it up to lead a very low-key, almost abstract fusion of pop and singer-songwriter sensibilities. It's a marriage between Mazzy star, Paradise motel, shoegaze, Nirvana (of the 90's, not the 60's band) and David Lynch.
However, the real strength of The aprons lies in their restraint. While they take their brevity from punk and their somberness from shoegazing there is one place they won't go to although their music almost begs and demands it: post-rock. So many bridges and crossovers seem to lead to a sonic explosion and a thick, syrupy wall of sound and noise, yet The aprons refuse (perhaps deliberately) to surrender to that. Instead, the duo plows steadily and methodically, grinding with their slowcore of infinite reserve and almost Spartan withdrawal. This duo constructs songs that seem to implode under their sheer denseness; even when they seem to be upbeat there is an elusive quality that serves as a weight, feverishly and relentlessly dragging you farther down.
Sound stain is one of the best albums I've heard this year and it's yet another triumphant release to come out of Israel this year.