Together Is the New Alone

Donnacha Costello doesn't try anything overly complex or ambitious on Together Is the New Alone, his first album for Mille Plateaux. Rather, he keeps his music simple and sparse, emphasizing lingering ambience. What lingers isn't so much the ten ambient pieces themselves though, but more so their respective, slowly modulating glistening melodies. Yes, it's quite simple, appealing to the senses rather than the intellect. In fact, it's not that far of a stretch from what Brian Eno proposed in his landmark Music for Airports album over 20 years earlier, an obvious touchstone for Costello. But it's perhaps better not to focus on how accessible these hypnotic songs are with their undeniable melodies -- soothing melodies that seem looped to infinity, looped until you can't escape them. Instead, it's more interesting to note Costello's transition here toward rather straightforward ambient music in comparison to his beat-driven Growing Up in Public album on Force Inc from a year earlier. There Costello didn't try to stumble listeners with overly complex, challenging arrangements either. However, on that sullen minimal techno album the emphasis was rhythm rather than melody. These differing approaches make Together Is the New Alone a perfect companion to Growing Up in Public. On both Costello proves himself to be a master craftsman in terms of creating elegant sounds and then arranging these sounds into repetative loops that he modulates undetectably. Whether you prefer a sense of rhythm or melody is somewhat trivial. Either way, Costello succeeds brilliantly, offering music that is both peripheral and captivating at the same time, music without poigiancy yet charged with texture. Together Is the New Alone is undoubtedly the more intimate and emotional of the two, given its emphasis on ambience and melody. ~ Jason Birchmeier