All Night the Calls Came In

Album Review

It's ironic that Halloween, Alaska's fourth album is meant to be their most spare-sounding, straightforwardly conceived recording to date, because anyone coming to the band's music for the first time would surely consider All Night the Calls Came In to be full of carefully crafted tracks built on artfully arrayed textures. Halloween, Alaska have always been oriented toward a lush, ambient feel, and while they've apparently striven to pare things down here — even recording much of the music live in the studio — it seems you just can't take the lushness out of these boys, at least not completely, and thank goodness for that. Whatever additional urgency and visceral quality may be contained here, this is still music to sink one's teeth into. The band hails from Minneapolis, and All Night feels like the product of frozen Minnesotan winter evenings where burrowing further into the deep end of the music is a more attractive option than calling it a night and heading outside. Even if those weren't the circumstances under which these cuts were recorded, the album still seems like the perfect soundtrack for such a setting. The band can be seen as a link in an art rock chain that reaches back through Radiohead to Talk Talk, Blue Nile, and the more atmospheric side of Roxy Music (say, Avalon era); conventional pop song structures aren't completely eschewed, but they aren't taken as a given either, and electronic textures intermingle freely with traditional rock band instrumentation, to bring home gracefully gliding melodies given voice by singer/keyboardist James Diers. Halloween, Alaska may be a mythical town, but on the strength of All Night the Calls Came In, it's one you'll want to visit often. ~ J. Allen, Rovi