A light rain has been coming down all evening, and you pull the collar of your jacket as high as it can go to avoid as much of the encroaching wetness as possible. People walk quickly up and down the sidewalk, umbrellas bumping into each other causing their own private showers. You duck into the bar and pay the cover, expecting a haze of smoke to greet you, but the atmosphere is as crystal-clear as possible on such an evening. Gazing across the room, you smile briefly to yourself at the peculiarity of couples engaged in intimate conversations shouted over the piped-in club music. You make your way past the bar, with the bartender straining to hear the orders sent her way, and move near the front of the stage, as the band seems ready to play. The extraneous music fades, leaving only a few dozen conversations between yourself and silence.

A film is projected onto the wall, filled with abstract shapes and symbols you can’t recognize. A radio is turned on, and a conversation begins to play over the speakers. The subject doesn’t matter, only that these people are there – the channel is changed, a baseball game is being cast live into the crowded bar. The conversations begin to die down, each individual slowly sucked into the haunting, simple beauty of radio taken out of its proper context. A Rhodes piano begins to play softly, adding its mellow tones to the ever-changing radio conversations projected upon the room. No one speaks anymore, and now even the radio is silent, replaced by the equally slow, warm sounds of a guitar. Strings are fed into laptops, processing them into ambient, pulsing companions to the instruments continuing their delicate, determined attack upon the ears and minds of everyone in attendance. By the time the violin slides out of the ambience and into a more acoustic role, you are lost to the enrapturing sound of Slow Six.

This is the unique power that exudes from the opening few minutes of the first track of Private Times in Public Places, and the album never lets up throughout the rest of its 73 minutes. Coming off the storm of excellent press their latest album Nor’easter received (including an excellent review by our own Joseph Sannicandro), it seems natural to re-release this 2004 album, opening it up to a wider audience, and Private Times in Public Places definitely doesn’t show its age, feeling as immediate as if you were literally present at one of the band’s much-heralded live performances. The album’s three pieces all portray an affinity for minimalism within a gorgeous, dynamic, performance-centered sensibility, avoiding generic attempts at classification as easily as “This is Your Last Chance (Before I Sleep)” moves from the eerie power of radio to the slow, hypnotic guitar.

I’ve never heard a live album that translated the feeling of a live performance as well as the studio-recorded Private Times in Public Places does, which in itself is a fitting testament to the mastery of their craft that is evident throughout the band’s catalog. Though it may be inappropriate to discuss how a band performs in a live setting as opposed to recorded in a review of the recorded material, the album’s title invites such a discussion, and the music itself does nothing but encourage it further. If you have a beating heart, working ears, and the patience to listen to half-hour long tracks that have the slow, careful, and unswerving dedication of minimalism, then you need to hear this album. It may take a few listens, but soon you’ll be in that club, surrounded by those people, sucked into that soft, slow, music – and you won’t want to go back.

-Zach Mills