The Receiver
Decades (Stunning Models on Display)
By Sheba White
Published: November 12th, 2006 | 8:33pm
After eating all you possibly could, you choose the cotton candy because it looks light and sugary. But nothing could be further from the truth. The gritty fluff unravels in silt-ridden layers, sticks to your hands, and goes down your throat like scratchy cobwebs. What began as a dessert suddenly has all the ritual of a meal, and you don’t know how it happened.
Listening to Decades, the first release and former thesis project of Casey Cooper, part of the brother duo the Receiver, is a similar experience. You get sucked in by the lulling harmonies of the pianist-singer or the steady cymbal-rattling leads of drummer Jesse Cooper and forget that in the pretty keyboard-framed melodies that comprise Decades there is a project; you’re going to have to do some work.
There are layers to be unraveled here, particularly in crescendo-built tracks like the appropriately titled “Waves” and the ominous drums on “Corner (PT. 2),” which fall off into hazy, tinkling keyboard notes at unexpected moments. Then there are lyrics, which include such existentialist woe as the ones in “Moments of Fire,” where Cooper breathily sings “Bodies are made to stay / Anxiety on display.”
Though the awful truth of things that seem so appealing on the surface is that they often disappoint as you dig deeper, and some argument could be made by the limited vocal range displayed here. Even so, the Receiver’s cloud-dense orchestral melodies will necessitate a knife and fork at some point.
Issue #30
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