“Layers” are of the utmost importance for any musician in the modern era. Unless an artist wishes to stick quite determinately to the unfortunately-bygone era of live-recording, layers will play a role of some degree in the recording process. Naturally, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing tends to depend mostly upon the skill of the artist in question, but also, to a lesser degree, upon the genre which this artist calls home. For electronica artists in particular, the use of layers has been embraced, not just as a necessary evil, but as a legitimate recording method, which offers just as many opportunities as it does potential pitfalls. Into this equation is thrust the increasingly enormous figure, Goddamn Electric Bill, who seems to offer up an entirely new method of thinking about the “layer” approach to recording.

Now, the traditional way to use layers is as something like a step-ladder: starting out very simply, you keep adding layers to build the complexity, until you reach a certain upper limit, and must slowly retreat back towards where you came. This approach has a wonderful unity about it, and a certain symmetry which makes the OCD portions of my brain light up with glee. Many of our most famous artists are wedded to this styles (almost all post-rockists included), and I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t created a few songs of this sort myself while fooling around in GarageBand. This is not to imply that songs of this nature are necessarily bad; Mono’s split with World’s End Girlfriend can be claimed as a true masterpiece of the style.

But it's getting a bit stagnant, frankly. Fortunately, Goddamn Electric Bill has an entirely new metaphor with which to consider the “layer” approach to music. Where “layer” artists were formerly satisfied with the step-ladder approach, GDEB writes music more akin to a dresser. I’ll give that another moment to sit in: GDEB writes music that can be most accurately described by using a receptacle of clothing.

Huh?

Sorry, just give me a minute. Imagine, if you can, a vast dresser, with many drawers, each fulfilling a different category. Except, instead of clothes, each drawer contains pure sound. As you might have guessed, each drawer within the dresser constitutes a “layer” of sound. Now, taken as a whole, this sonic dresser constitutes a song, with all of the individual pieces stacked on top of each other, and playing along simultaneously. Here is where the role of the artist comes in.  As it is, the dresser is playing its song on auto-pilot. All of the essential component are there, and surely a select few would praise the song as is, but it’s missing a vital human component. Enter Jason Torbert, the man behind Goddamn Electric Bill. As the song is playing along, Torbert picks up a stool, places it in front of his dresser, and begins to pull the drawers towards him, one at a time.

Now, with the drawer open, Mr. Torbert is free to manipulate that layer as he chooses. And he does so brilliantly. As he does so, all of the other layers in the song/dresser continue to play along as if nothing had happened. When he’s done, Torbert pushes the drawer back into place, and pulls out another, and repeats the process until the song is complete.

In essence, every song on Torbert’s sophomore effort, Topics for Gossips, is constructed in such a manner: the artist will briefly examine a single, solitary layer within the song at large, manipulate it as he sees fit, and then insert it back into the regular mix, as though nothing had ever happened. I can’t quite say that it always works completely, but it’s a radically different approach to layer-recording, and when it does work, it does so brilliantly.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that, despite the rather angry sounding moniker, Topics for Gossip is a rather happy sounding record. It’s the sort of one which just might melt your fears away. This is especially true of the occasional vocal tracks, which stand out from the rest of the album, not just because of their vocal presence, but also because of their excellence. Really, it’s rather hard to listen to “Ten Thousand Years,” the incredibly-deep, yet still catchy-as-fuck highlight of the album, without thinking that, in the (perhaps very) long run, everything will turn out quite alright. With an economy in the shitter, and politicians who only seem to want to flush it further down, paying the Electric Bill just might be the single most delightful thing you do this Fall.

I really must urge you: please do not pass this record up. I truly cannot think of anyone to whom I would not recommend this record. Of the the many quite different goals for an album then, it's really quite arguable that Mr. Torbert has succeeded in the most significant of them all.

-Tom Butcher