High Watt Electrocutions Find Peace in The Bermuda Triangle
By all accounts, Winnipeg native Ryan Settee, aka High Watt Electrocutions, is a man who writes albums based on a concept. High Watt Electrocutions’ first record, Night Songs (2007) was a collection of precisely that, and the follow-up, Desert Opuses (2009), also delivered on its titular premise. Now with a third full-length (released as the first two were on Settee’s own Introspection Records imprint), The Bermuda Triangle, Settee leaves behind both the desert and the night and works within a different sonic context entirely. If there’s a mission, a concept or a theme to The Bermuda Triangle, it’s daytime, sunshine, wandering, and maybe even getting lost on the way.
The album is available in a limited CD pressing of 500 with hand-painted covers. The songs — or parts, anyway — are presented as one long track topping out at just under 39 minutes. I listened through the album several times, ripped it to see the wav form, and came up with a list of 14 different parts. Settee, as I’d later see on the High Watt Electrocutions website, notes 16, and if you look at the file names for the audio samples there-listed, you can see he gives the parts titles such as “Optimism,” “Inevitability,” and “Washed Out to Sea.” The progression of titles and their occasional interrelation makes it seem likely Settee is forming some narrative that plays out musically on The Bermuda Triangle, but as the track is instrumental save for a small section of non-verbal vocalizing and there’s nothing about it anywhere either on the packaging or the website, that’s merely an assumption on my part. If you want to put a story to it, certainly the music Settee provides on acoustic and electric guitar, synths and swirls is plenty open to interpretation.
More than arc, however, what The Bermuda Triangle is about is the feel and atmosphere it creates. It is a tropical album for sure, with ringing notes of Americana similar to Earth’s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull and psychedelic backwards guitar that seems to make your place no place at all, similar, I imagine, to how you might feel watching the needle of your compass spin uncontrollably as a result of some magnetic disturbance. Settee reinterprets Black Sabbath’s “Flufff” à la Citay before the first 10 minutes of The Bermuda Triangle have passed, progressing to a Beatles-type bouncing rhythm shortly before a longer section evokes the aforementioned dronier feel. Later, a country rhythm line plays out acoustically under a fuzzy lead, making for one of the album’s least serene but ultimately most satisfying moments, and when the synths announce the coming of The Bermuda Triangle’s final movement, you definitely get a sense of arrival at your destination. You made it.
If there’s incongruity anywhere on High Watt Electrocutions’ new offering, it’s in the final minute or two, when a sample of a thunderstorm gradually brings the album to its close. After the peaceful ambience of the preceding music, it seemed a curious choice, but I suppose you can’t have a record called The Bermuda Triangle without a sense of foreboding somewhere on there. This is only a small inconsistency, though, and it hardly pulls you out of the hypnotic spell the rest of the album puts you in, so it’s not a problem. Settee’s movement into new sonic territory with High Watt Electrocutions succeeds in what it sets out to do, capturing a previously-unseen side of his musical personality while still maintaining the quality of execution those familiar with the project have come to expect of it. If he’s taking dares, I’d like to see Settee develop a bridge somehow between his previous work and this style of writing, but for now, The Bermuda Triangle is a pretty good way to lose yourself.
High Watt Electrocutions website
High Watt Electrocutions on Last.FM
Tags: Canada, High Watt Electrocutions, Introspection, Winnipeg
