Description:
Modern Nature – The Heat Warps (2025)
Review:
Modern Nature’s songs exist within a sunny fog, all soft contours and elliptical inference. Wistful choruses drift by, occasionally bolstered by shadowy CSNY-style harmonies, as phrases emerge and recede, widely separated by pauses. It’s all very languid and impressionistic on the surface, but carefully structured underneath. The crisp minimalism of drum and bass pushes forward but quietly, like a krautrock rhythm section swathed in batting. Two guitars play at each other with lucid precision, not in sync, not even really in conversation, but approaching the same problem from different directions. The Heat Warps is Jack Cooper’s sixth album as Modern Nature, following stints in similarly serene but prickly outfits Ultimate Painting and Mazes. The project has mutated considerably over time, incorporating free jazz musicians and writers of experimental prose into its later albums, but retaining a core ensemble of Cooper, Jim Wallis on drums and Jeff Tobias (of Sunwatchers) on bass. This time, however, Modern Nature adds a fourth member, the guitarist and improviser Tara Cunningham, best known for her work in Red Snapper. You can hear Cooper and Cunningham finding a way to work together on opening cut “Pharoah,” one of the tracks that drives the hardest and most emphatically on clacks of woodblock, thrusts of snare, and booms of bass sound. The guitars scribble in the margins, lobbing clots of syncopated notes at one another over the beat, then listening, thinking, and responding in kind. The instrumental sound is knotty and challenging, but it’s laid over with a soothing vocal drone. Cooper’s torn, frayed murmur picks up charcoal-smudged harmonies here, a folk sound tinged with jazzy experimentation. “Alpenglow” is the clear highlight, with gemlike guitar tones glittering over its fuzzy, insistent propulsion. The song is on the move, clearly, but also utterly calming, spare and architectural, but embellished, suddenly, with lavish harmonies. Sings Cooper, “Finally making some sense of it all/ Finally everything starting to fall/ Into a pattern that infinite factors break out in fear.” And in a way, that’s Modern Nature—a band that creates patterns out of complex fractal parts and limpid beauty out of multiplicity. — daily.bandcamp.com
Track List:
01. Pharaoh
02. Radio
03. Glance
04. Source
05. Jetty
06. Alpenglow
07. Zoology
08. Takeover
09. Totality
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Origin: Cambridge, UK 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)
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