Setting

Following their exploratory debut and a trio of live recordings that find the group stretching in infinite directions, Setting returns with a new album driven by introspection and improvisation. Pulling from their pasts working with Mind Over Mirrors, Califone, Black Twig Pickers, Pelt, Peeesseye, and Sylvan Esso, the band draws from a a diverse skillset that seeps into the seems of the new album. The debut tended to foster their folk pasts, pasting rhythm to Nathan Bowles’ stringwork, weaving orbs of ambience around their pieces. On the new album, Fennelly takes the lead, dipping the record deep into the reaches of kosmiche with a synth-forward approach. The new record buzzes with an electric life, an incandescent spirit that flickers and fizzes while still poking through the fogged ambience of their first record.

The band’s noted how naturally this album came together, and from the flow of Setting, the listener can feel the symbiosis grow on tape. As the opening tracks let Fenelly and Westerlund spar with synth and sticks, the band completes the bridge of past and future on “Ribbon of Moss,” a showcase for Bowles that’s shaded in from the edges with neon washes of keys. The band finds the uncanny crevices between the natural world and an unsettling vision of the future. They craft alien landscapes aglow in humid hues, perfumed with musk and mud. The intervening years found the band feeling out their live evolution and it all comes to a head nicely on this eponymous outing.

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