Departure Lounge: Too Late To Die Young

The mid-Ohio sound sculptors of The Six Parts Seven belong to a musical tradition that includes Brian Eno, Love Tractor, and seemingly every Tortoise fan who's picked up an instrument in the past five or six years. Their shared concept involves using traditional rock ingredients to produce ambient, non-linear tones ranging from abrasive and challenging to mellow and pleasing. The Six Parts Seven rests on the pretty end of that scale. The group's third LP, Things Shaped In Passing, collects nice sounds—gently picked guitars, the distant whimper of a lap steel guitar, a ripple of piano, drums lightly tapped or brushed—and loosely arranges them into eight nebulous compositions that offer either inoffensive background music or, for the attentive, a brief mental vacation to a stark but scenic landscape. The only real problem with this kind of music is that it's difficult to analyze, beyond noting that it's light, listenable, and largely indistinct. The softer and more shapeless the rock song, the more it needs lyrics or some kind of vocal performance to provide a focus. The cause of rock 'n' roll loveliness is perhaps better forwarded by an outfit like Departure Lounge, a British band led by Robyn Hitchcock protégé and Cocteau Twins devotee Tim Keegan. For Departure Lounge's second album, Too Late To Die Young, Keegan and his mates collaborate with French nouveau-disco artiste Kid Loco on a set of conventionally balladic U.K. pop songs, enhanced by multi-instrumental atmospherics and homages to the group's heroes. The song "Alone Again, And…" (a nod to the morose '60s psychedelic band Love) converts a minimalist acoustic lament into an echoing drone, wherein abstract electronic hum absorbs Keegan's high, unenunciated crooning. The instrumental "Tubular Belgians In My Goldfield" unconsciously borrows the twangy guitar from New Order's haunting "Elegia," adding a trip-hop rhythm track and New Age textures that point toward the seminal work of Mike Oldfield without following his exact path. That track fades into the bouncy vaudeville number "Be Good To Yourself," which is ebullient but muted with bursts of guitar feedback and bleating horns. Too Late To Die Young displays an optimistic tone and some sparkling, pithy tendencies, but Keegan and company add a thin layer of the downbeat to each confection. They understand that just as the most breathtaking vistas seem empty without a human figure, so beauty must be enhanced by a streak of sadness.