by Nick Webber (@nickrwebber)
There are a couple different kinds of kids in the world. There are the rule followers: the children whose idea of success is perfectly recreating the model in the Lego instruction booklet. Then there are the kids who end up building Godzilla out of a racecar set.
Blessed are the second kind of kid. There is a fearlessness, even a playfulness, to what this experimental art rock band from Vancouver pulls off on iii, an EP that contains multitudes in its lean runtime. Within the first couple minutes, you’ve heard enough ideas for four separate songs; a downtempo indietronica vibe melts into an ornately harmonized guitar arpeggio passage, an ominous groove gets decimated by isolated quarter note shotgun blast snares and moaning guitars.
It’s a brilliant tone-setter for a project that uses expectation against you like a weapon. “So many things you can’t control,” warns frontman Drew Riekman on “Centre,” right before the babbling flood of drum machine toms grows fangs and starts shouting at you. “Structure” is built around a pentatonic piano riff (a fresh texture in the Blessed canon) that repeats almost incessantly while the band tessellates around it. Repetition is a prevalent plaything throughout the project, showing up in cyclical barbed wire guitar figures, morse code drum and bass patterns, piano ostinatos... the more times an element is repeated, the more you begin to form ideas about where the music might go. Blessed is daring you to anticipate the next change. Then, just when you have acclimated to subversion, the band hits you with “Movement,” the most mellow song of their career, channeling a lo-fi indie rock stride akin to a haunted Beach Boys cassette that got fried by the sun. Complete with vintage vocal harmonies and a buoyant ascending bassline, it sounds like a song from a dream reality that somehow found its way through a tear in the space-time continuum while you were scanning the radio stations.
The EP is masterfully paced, resulting in the most concise and cohesive portrait of Blessed thus far. It is stuffed to the brim with novel ideas and rewards myriad listens, but don’t confuse spontaneity for chaos. If just one block was out of place, the whole thing could fall. The thrill of iii is in the precariousness of the structure. It’s a marvel that it holds together the way it does, and judging by the cover art, that’s exactly what Blessed intended.