All India Radio + Bonus DVD

Album Review

Beginning with the chilled feedback ambience of "Home," All India Radio's self-titled album is a gentle masterpiece of instrumental rock, contrasting against the frenetic noise of their countrymen the Dirty Three and the aggressive shifts between loud/soft/loud of Mogwai with slow and steady guitar/electronics soundscapes that balance between feelings of the past and a sense of a vast yet melancholy future. Shifting between short transitional pieces and longer compositions, the overall feeling of the album is of being out in some near-empty desert in an eternal sunset glow, near dark but not quite there yet. It makes the song "Evening Star" all that much more appropriately titled, the steady drumming and softly rising keyboards and sense of distant space framing the lovely main guitar line. "Waukaringa," with its own guitar part disappearing and almost total silence before a sudden lush return by the full band, is its own example of suddenly beautiful change, as is the "Trincomalee" percussion loop of backwards beats and almost dub bass. The slow brushed drum and twangy guitar of "Tijuana Dream," not to mention the melancholy yet utterly beautiful and serene string synths later in the song, looks back to everyone from the Walkabouts and Chris Isaak to Lee Hazlewood but finds its closest contemporaries in the Paradise Motel, at once "modern" and a burnt-out dream of it, feeling like a conclusion to an epic film soundtrack. As for the shorter pieces, they often have a clear beauty of their own, like the soft piano parts and rising and falling feedback and drone flow of "Voodoo Instrumental."