The album distant waves, built around evolving texture and a shattered drum line, is reflective, ambient, dark, and deceptively urgent.
This review contains spoilers for distant waves. While I can't promise you'll have the same experience I had, I don't think my experience would have been possible if I read the following review prior to listening.
It doesn't have a fast tempo, but the evolving textures have a sense of urgency to them that I'm not used to feeling in ambient music.
Track two, looking out, introduces a scattered but repeating percussion pattern accentuating this forward momentum. It's not a drum line in the traditional sense, but rather an ambient layer built from drum sounds. The percussion takes center stage in track three, picturing, with the gradual addition of a metronomic bass line. However at no point do the drums coalesce into an ordinary drum groove, always remaining shattered. With each track, I feel pulled in further and more urgently.
The high point of the album comes in track four, what could have been. With a playtime of 8:41, it's more than double the length of the next longest track. This track finally makes clear to me what I've found so compelling up to this point. Anticipation. For the full duration of this track, we are repeatedly teased with what sounds like a snippet of a drum break. After hearing this two or three times, one might expect a full drum groove to play, but it never gives in.
It dawns on me that it feels like I've been waiting this whole time for the song to start. The whole album has that feeling you might find in the 30 second introduction to an atmospheric drum and bass track, stretched out over the course of 20 minutes.
My initial assessment, that the pace felt fast, in a sense was completely inaccurate. In reality, the pace was glacial, only appearing fast because I mistook the small details for the bigger picture.
I'm left genuinely stunned. It's hard to say where the line is between artistic intention and subjective interpretation, but in my eyes I've witnessed a magic trick. Like a good plot twist, I felt a sudden revelation that recontextualized everything up to that point.
