Set Fire to Flames – Sings Reign Rebuilder

October 9, 2001 • Alien8 Recordings

Since I've been on a Godspeed kick lately (in preparation for their new LP, obviously) I decided to pull out the album that has been in my collection the longest and I haven't rated it yet, despite getting a vinyl copy and being a fan of the group for so long. I've actually always had trouble wrapping my head around Set Fire to Flames. Their two albums are each sprawling, dense works of post-rock and field recordings and sound art that come and go too quickly to really wrap your head around and get immersed in.

One one hand (and maybe because I listen to this so infrequently) every time I spin this album it seems pretty fresh and I find a lot of different things to pick out and explore. The full-band post-rock sections are really quite good; not up to Godspeed standards, unfortunately, but they do the emotive climactic buildup thing well. The sound clips and samples that helped make F♯A♯∞ so incredible are here as well, though a bit hard to find. The album's strongest element is probably the viola-violin duets (such as that which opens the fantastic "Omaha"); I always love those on Godspeed's records and they have a bit more room on this album to breathe and expand.

On the other hand Sings Reign Rebuilder can be a chore to listen to. It's incredibly long at over seventy-three minutes and a good chunk of those minutes are really not that interesting. On just the second track we're subjected to a grating ten-minute section of noisy droning that, while it does eventually reach a nice climax, takes absolutely forever to get anywhere—and when it does, the ending is disappointingly short. I mean yeah, I'm not much of a patient listener anymore, not as much as I was when I started listening to this type of music. So your mileage may (will) vary.

On the other hand (in this exercise I have at least three hands) the noise and drone and general messing about is really an essential part of what makes this album work (and it does work, despite my complaints), and if one were to take one half of the album and somehow separate it from the other it would all fall apart into a giant mess and then nobody would be happy and where would we be? And in the end it's just an album, one that's ugly, and beautiful, and boring, and fascinating, and after all this I still don't know if I like it or not. Definitely some bits I do, and definitely some bits I don't, so on the whole yeah it's not bad.