Eclecticism, thy name is ii.  ii is an Australian duo who write music that mashes together most of the best elements of the minimal, ambient, improvisational, and pop genres.

Wait, sorry.  I think I missed that.  What was that last one?  “Pop,” you say?  How does that work?

The answer is: I’m not quite sure.  But somehow it does.  Their sound consists mostly of deep, drone laden swells, which happen to have some pop hooks and aesthetics supplanted on top of it.  At times, one of these elements will almost completely take over the music, but their most compelling works feature an almost effortless blend of these two seemingly antithetical elements.  I suppose that, like oil and vinegar, if you shake pop and minimalism together to just the right degree, they’ll somehow combine to form a tasty treat.  One thing’s for sure: ambient music has never seemed so catchy before.

A large part of this may be due to the sense of a spontaneous and vivid zest for life which so thoroughly permeates Landlakes.  This zest is created by the general enthusiasm which band members Alex Nosek and John Tjhia so obviously feel for their work, but also by the improvisational nature of their music.  They describe their sound as being both planned and improvisational, which I’m guessing means that they come up with a general structure for each song and then play around with it until they’re satisfied.  It would seem that much of this pop experimentation comes about during this stage of the compositional process.  It is rare for an album to seem so meticulously crafted, and yet so full of spontaneous life, and this is ii’s greatest achievement.

I am really at a loss to point out negative aspects of this album.  If it is not always fantastic, it is certainly never bad.  Though sometimes the pop/ambient formula falters and leaves the listener unimpressed, when it succeeds, as in most of the tracks and especially on “Tropes,” it’s almost impossible to imagine ever going back to regular ambient again.  Work in this innovative spirit is exactly what every critic dreams of encouraging bands to develop, and I am certainly no different.  Landlakes is a superb debut, and one which promises even higher developments from the Land(lake) Down Under.

-Tom Butcher