FRACTIONS 2005

**** Daily Telegraph Feature Album
"..soaring, savage and simply superb creation, so compelling and original that it almost hurts..a mark of real genius"

CD of the Week Drum Media
" A brilliant album from one of the most ingenious bands out there."

**** The Australian
"Epic, grand otherworldly"

****1/2 Feature Album Rave
"Fractions is probably the most human exercise in musical dreaming for years. A brilliant and captivating work."

Sydney Morning Herald
Since Decoder Ring won the Australian Film Institute award for best original music score and an IF award for best soundtrack for the 2004 movie Somersault, they have been confronted with the challenge of "Where do we go from here?"
The answer, as their third album demonstrates, is to push beyond their already adventurous boundaries while providing more of the gorgeous same.
Australia has no great tradition of experimental electronic music so Decoder ring's imaginative live light shows, explorations in electronics and dance rhythms, adventures in improvisation (shades of Tangerine Dream in the 1970s) and their ability to create extraordinarily beautiful soundscapes (shades of Brian Eno) have had to find new audiences prepared to be challenged and amazed. At times they sit on the pulsating edge of electro dance (Escape Pod and the mesmerising 451), at other times they seem like an '80s pop band (Out Of Range), early Pink Floyd (Traffic) and a sublime cross between Eno and Neu (Remainie).
Bruce Elder

In The Mix
Sydney-based six-piece band Decoder Ring experienced a massive leap in terms of their public profile last year as a result of their acclaimed musical score for Cate Shortland's movie Somersault, which received plaudits from all around the world, including a standing ovation at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. While Decoder Ring's earlier releases such as 2002's Spooky Action At A Distance EP and their debut self-titled album showed the six-piece outfit blending analogue synths with indie-rock guitars to create a streamlined electro-rock fusion, the Somersault score showed the band's already filmic sound stretching out into even more lush and ambient territory. In the wake of the band winning the coveted AFI award for the Somersault score and also working on the score to Tony Krawitz's film Jewboy, the second album proper from Decoder Ring Fractions shows the band's sound taking on even more lush textural qualities informed by ambient electronics, krautrock and shoegazer rock, with the increasing expansiveness of their sound a quality definitely informed by their soundtrack work.
Opening track Jets starts things on a gliding indie-pop trajectory, with colourful jangling guitar chords that call to mind early period New Order or Galaxie 500 rippling their way over phasing New Wave synths and clattering live drums as vocal Lenka's (who joined the band circa Somersault is now a firmly-installed full-time band member) delicate breathy intonations slide over the synthetic-edged rhythms in some mid-point between Broadcast's Trish Keenan and Slowdive. Serac takes things down into glacial instrumental beauty that calls to mind Somersault's ambient orchestral wash, with melancholy stretched-out cello chords making their way effortlessly over an icily precise backing of slow drum loops and twinkling synths, before Escape Pod locks things down into clicking electro-house rhythms, some choppy delayed guitar riffs that carry a hint of The Edge circa Unforgettable Fire spiralling around the beats as things suddenly drop down into a delicate yet sinister breakdown of eerie chiming tones and looming bass.
Traffic features Art Of Fighting's Ollie Browne on vocals, his world-weary sounding tones floating through a backdrop of gently plucked acoustic guitars and delayed-out fretboard howls that call to mind Bends-era Radiohead, ambient synth drones lurking just slightly out of view as the guitars swell up beneath Browne's epic chorus, while the downright sinister 451 places a punk-funk bassline below some dark electro synths that carry more than a hint of EBM-industrial stomp, the buzzing arpeggios accelerating towards the redline as snare buildups and dark distorted guitars scream their way through the mix. To Die reintroduces Lenka's rich multitracked vocal harmonies over a swooning backdrop of sweeping orchestral textures, jangling indie guitar riffs and live drums in a moment that recalls mid-nineties 4AD act Lush's widescreen pop, before closing title track Fractions takes things out on a shimmering electro-pop tangent, jangling guitar chords intertwining themselves around distorted rock riffs and some oddly disco-tinged synth sequences as Lenka's breathy tones glide effortlessly over the complex rhythms below.

A stunning second album from Decoder Ring that shows the six-piece outfit continuing to shift their music towards a more lush expansive and flowing incarnation that carries hints of the mechanistic rhythms of Krautrock acts such as Can and Neu! as much as it does soft-focus echoes of the early / mid-nineties 'shoegazer' sound typified by the likes of Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and the 4AD label roster. If you were captivated by the deep sensous blend of sonic textures and eerie-yet-beautiful female vocals Decoder Ring brought to bear on their work for the Somersault score, Fractions promises to take you on a seriously engrossing journey with plenty of emotionally poignant crescendos along the way. One of the best releases I've heard this year, easy.
inthemix.com.au