Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - On The Echoing Green LP

Label: Mexican Summer

Our Review:

Beginning with his overt homage to lovesliescrushing on the Love Is A Stream album from 2010, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has reinvented himself as a sonic confectioner of sugar-crush drone pop. One of the two piloting guitarists for the now defunct Tarentel, Cantu-Ledesma remains an intrepid experimentalist with style and form. This was certainly the case for Tarentel which traversed the avant-rock landscapes, first soaring through post-rock crescendos of radioluminescent guitar noise akin to Mogwai and Godspeed! You Black Emperor. As the band progressed, Cantu-Lesdema was encouraging the band to embrace digital trickery, tape manipulation, unconventional instrumentation and disjointed time signatures, cross-referencing the aesthetics of Fennesz, AMM and Talk Talk. This evolution continued into his solo work which really came into its own on that aforementioned 2010 record. On The Echoing Green once again shifts things but in a more subtle manner. Pre-fab drum machine rhythms gird the mostly-instrumental songs that cycle through wistfully melodic guitar lines and equally bucolic drifts of liquid ambience.