Imperial Topaz “Full of Grace”

07 Mar 2014 — Trey Reis

Music defined by its mood and compositions for film soundtracks have always gone hand-in-hand.  The hum of music can play just as much of a role in shaping the mood of a scene as the choice of lighting, the acting, or the cinematography. I have this habit of creating visuals for the music I listen to. My mind has always listened cinematically. It’s a habit I’d like to be able to shut off, to experience a piece of music unfiltered and unconsidered. Just heard. Although, the creation of visual cues for much of the new music I hear, spread like branches across the horizon of the Internet, certainly helps with these write-ups.

This new Imperial Topaz album, Full of Grace, certainly has a cinematic nature to it, insofar as each of the album’s eight tracks are dripping with moody synthesizer melodies, echoing alone underneath the haunting thump of drum machines, and vocalist Caroline Teagle’s will-o’-the-wisp vocals glowing in the distance as they fade down the foggy path. It’s the general formula for the album, yet the vocals don’t appear in the mix until nearly five minutes into the album. It's the slow-burn of an empty, isolated introduction scene, and like any good introduction, it sets the stage for everything to come.

As the album progresses, the qualities which bind each song in the consistency of the mood, are delicately placed and withdrawn, the whole sound often devolving into its most skeletal forms, before the fog settles in again. It’s a practice in transparency, as the knob on the mix moves between the extremes of opaque concealment and clarity in vision spreading for miles in every direction, your feet sinking into the coolness of the “Wet Sand” as waves crash down and recede according to the universal settings of tempo, obscured and set by the essence of the length of scenes, the thumping pace in the mood, and the frame as a definition of sound space.

Listen to album closer, “Wet Sand” below, and buy the entirety of Full of Grace on limited edition vinyl over at Tranquility Tapes.