Zelienople Give It Up

• Words: Brandon Bussolini
• Label: Type
• XLR8R Rating: 7/10

Somewhat confusingly described in their press materials as a "jazz trio," Zelienople may share Bohren & der Club of Gore's fixation on Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks music, but they cut that dreaminess with wandering clouds of guitar-nourished despair. It gives the proceedings a smudged and inconsolable soiled-American vibe similar to Steven R. Smith's music, with a few formal nods to ambient electronic. Give It Up's drift is fuzzy without being particularly warm; while Bohren could pass as perverse dinner-party music, Zelienople has created something much more solitary. The album's slight menace challenges the equivalence between ambient music and thoughtful domestic life; this seems to have less to do with tea than extinction.