Album: John Parish

Like Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno and Nigel Godrich, John Parish is one of alt.rock's great enablers, a man whose way with the studio "fairy dust", to use Reg Presley's evocative term, can greatly enhance another artist's material. The careers of PJ Harvey, Eels, Sparklehorse and Goldfrapp, to name but four, would have been rather less engaging without Parish's attention to ambience and arrangements; but denied the discipline of having to focus on outside material, his own work here seems sketchy and piecemeal, as if he himself were in need of an enabler of his own to bring the best out of his compositions. The album title is something of a misnomer, Parish's music tending more towards the cerebral and refined than the intuitive, instinctive wildness suggested by animal movement. Built on cornet and lachrymose violins, with only the occasional telling discord disturbing its elegant, restrained progress, the title track comes across as a stately, semi-formal processional, as if the animals concerned were in some sad circus parade, cowed if not caged. Elsewhere, lugubrious guitar, horn and piano figures are manipulated in typical Thrill Jockey post-rock manner on "Westward Airways" and "Florida Recount", with wistful violin laments such as "Absolute Beauty Is An Absolute Curse" and "Without Warning His Heart Stopped Beating" providing occasional glum interludes. PJ Harvey and Eric Drew Feldman add a certain ramshackle charm with the closing raunchy "Airplane Blues", but other than that the prevailing mood here is, contrary to the title's promise, somewhat lifeless.