Track Listing

1. Seabird
2. Things Will Never Be the Same
3. Dream Is Going Down
4. Endless Happiness
5. Big Drop

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102595 in Music
• Released on: 2003-07-29
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Excellent Music
While the importance of originality is quite wrongly prioritized by far too many of today's music snobs (fans and critics alike), the indisputable and endlessly impressive uniquity of Brooklyn's Black Dice can be pretty exciting for those interested in hearing new things. With Beaches and Canyons, their massive, 2002 double-LP, they truly prove themselves to be the premier knob-twisting, pedal-tweaking band of this generation. Although, noting the lack of today's at-all popular groups to be described that way, just saying that won't really suffice, as far as justifying 5 stars goes.
Beaches and Canyons was an album conceived with its title in mind, its five, sprawling compositions (practically one song per side, on vinyl) evoking images of vast, surreal landscapes that stretch out far beyond the once-limits of your mind (sorry). This group makes sounds that are impossible to understand how they manipulate--the liner notes credit them for playing triple as many effect pedals than traditional instruments. Simple melodies expand and become more than you could ever have imagined them to in the first place, and if there's any real genius behind this album, it's how it plays off as such a free-form one, when in reality it's structures are heavy and numerous. Patterned, continuous loops are liberated from positive monotony by amorphous electronic garble and the mind-bending beauty of sung, single-syllable notes, drawn out with slow, echoing delay. Drums are heavy and rhythmic when hit, but percussion is used mostly for atmospheric purposes, defined by long cymbal-washes and abstractly placed bass drum pulses. Everything is so expansive and repetitive and yet not one bit anti-climactic.
Black Dice is all over the place with their sound: they're hard, ascetic, European minimalist music professors, bent over their generators of random blips and bleeps; they're hazy dub mystics, surrounded in fogs of ganja, lost in their makeshift grooves and their digital wonderlands of sound; they're psychedelic noise-rock pioneers, wildly abusing circuit-bent Frankenstein creations of their own. At once, they're all of this and so much more, and yet it's unfair to pin them that way. It's impossible to listen to this record and find one moment in which you can really nail them down to just one other artist or one other sound. More importantly, their sounds are colorful and elsewhere-unheard.
Someday I'd like to see the beaches and canyons that Black Dice have seen, the ones that inspired them to make this music, and the ones that they've taken me to in my head, but somehow I feel they'll only ever be heard, and quite honestly, that makes me sad.

why is there not more music liek this????
even the other black dice albums aren't like this. this is such a good album. its nature and noise and new age and metal and brilliance.

This is the way forward.
(I'm posting this here because I accidentally placed my review for Beaches and Canyons under Black Dice's Creature Comforts album. No matter, both are excellente!)

After a few releases of great analog-wrecked noise madness and harsh reality, Black Dice have uncorked something incredibly fresh and welcome.

This is where Morton Subotnick gets to hash it out with Boards of Canada.

Really astonishing record, this. Timeless. And new. One of the 2-3 best things to happen in music this year if not the decade. It's a giant leap ahead of their peers into a new genre. Beaches and Canyons is endlessly more fascinating to listen to than any electroclash triphop drum'n'bass glitch postrock trance jungle techno you've heard. Plus it rocks more and surprises more than anything from those genres I am aware of. Too excellent. Wait no longer.

As highly recommended: Creature Comforts.