Kevin Bronson on December 14th, 2010

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Alpine Decline – the new project from ex-Mezzanine Owls Jonathan Zeitlin (guitar) and Pauline Mu (drums) – has released two vinyl albums in six months. The first displayed Zeitlin’s fondness for pedal effects, textures and noisy exploration, but the second, “Visualizations,” applies his joneses in a more traditional songwriting framework, and it’s beautiful. Oh, it’s still drenched in reverb and deliriously woozy, but here the textures have become part of the landscape rather than the focus. “Visualizations” – recorded with experimentalist M. Geddes Gengras at his Green Machines studio – was inspired in part by adventures Zeitlin and Mu had in China (they gigged in Shanghai and Beijing after their first record) and in the mountains of Tibet and the Sierras. If this is what elevation sickness sounds like, it’s worth the climb.

||| Download: “CCTV” (stream the whole album here)

||| Live: Alpine Decline celebrates its album release with a show Jan. 5 at the Silverlake Lounge featuring Seasons, Polls and Manhattan Murder Mystery.