Layered sounds are delicious like a three-tiered Double Stuf Oreo. They provide such an incredible array of places for the ears to focus on, the acoustic guitar playing almost foreground, electric guitar distortion gleaming smoothly like cream someplace in the middle, or the percussive stomping of teeth present with every savored chew of the sandwich cookie. The taste swishes around in the mouth, tongue hearing fabulous mixtures of sounds that exist certainly as themselves, but cannot be help but be joined together in the mind's perception of sense.

Jatun, in their debut eponymous album, know how good Oreos can taste, and are sharing them with everybody. Jatun's cookies aren't scarfed down by the sleeve, each little sandwich having only a curt meeting with the tongue before they get shoved down the throat to make room for the new batch is oh-so much more fresh and better. These songs are savored, letting our tongues slip through all the bits of the cookie that can't be advertised on the packaging. This is where the joy of Jatun comes from anyway, finding our own moments in this mixture of sounds that we name our favorite and come back to. When searching for that one moment again, from the dense shoegazer haze of "Bee Bee" to the jubilant denouement of "The Temptation of Joy," we sift through all of the silkened rhythms, dodging our focus back and forth throughout all of the layered sounds to catch a taste on our tongue that strikes a bit of sugar directly to our brains, and now we've got something else to love about Jatun.

Jatun provides us with basic toys to play with, simple ambient rhythms that we find new ways have fun with. We connect each action figure into each other to create a sort of Voltron, Mega Transformer Robot, of music that we enjoy having with us, not for any great reason, only because it looks so cool, and so we play. Jatun creates for the listener an ambient playground that each listener can create his/her own games on, choosing whatever streaming sound to play and wade in next.

Similar Albums:
M83 - Before the Dawn Heals Us
Slowdive - Souvlaki
Tim Hecker - Harmony in Ultraviolet

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Paul Bozzo
03.07.2007