Cleared – Serpens CD

Cleared – Serpens CD

"It’s three years since the last Cleared album, Drown, completed a trilogy of long players for Immune Recordings. Guitarist Michael Vallera and drummer Steven Hess didn’t exactly split up, but they spent enough time on other projects — Luggage, Locrian, Haptic, Innode, and solo work — that the band seemed to have gone on ice. But time away can clarify why you did something in the first place, and the duo’s fourth long player asserts a renewed sense of purpose.

While even a cursory listen to this CD — Cleared’s first after a string of analog releases — detects that it’s the same people using the same tools, the relationships between their materials have evolved. You will still hear chunks of stripped-down rock and expanses of layered, electronically sculpted sound. But where Cleared once presented these elements in sequence, they are combined on Serpens in a way that draws more attention to the whole. The cover, which depicts contoured images that have been cut up and copied to make a new, discreet entity, is an apt metaphor for what Hess and Vallera have done with passages derived from sustained cymbal overtones, tolling guitar notes and pinging circuits. You don’t hear the joins between passages, you hear them as a thing punctuated by subtly magnified events — a microphone bump, one hissing note — that put everything in relief without being separated from said thing. The CD format’s innate combination of bounded listening and potential continuity reinforces the experience of Serpens as a complete and bounded entity; unless you insist on dumping it into a playlist or library, it will occupy a passage of time that is unbroken between beginning and end.

Cover aside, this music does not have much time for metaphor. It is what it is, as if Hess and Vallera decided that in order for there to be a point to a fourth Cleared album, they’d have to both advance the use of Cleared’s sonic vocabulary and hone in on its essence. They have done both." - Bill Meyer / Dusted