Owen Steel battles sound with sound on his rapturously sensory-overload album, COMBE.
I live with constant din. Without going into specifics, there’s rarely a moment of silence—an utter and complete void of audio from televisions or radios—in my home while I am awake. Most times, I can tune it out and ignore it, but there are moments when I try manifesting a city-wide power failure, if only to get a minute of peace.
New Brunswick-based composer and musician Owen Steel describes a similar battle with noise as the impetus for his rapturously sensory-overload album, COMBE. “As I worked on the record, I kept asking myself, what is this album even about?” he recently explained, noting that as he began dissecting his lyrics after the fact, “It dawned on me that I was subconsciously writing an album about dealing with internal clamour. I was fighting sound with sound.”
Opening track “The Battery” also finds Steel fighting with himself (kind of), assuming that he’s playing the part of the ranting telephone answering machine message leaver. The track evolves (or devolves?) as Steel echoes its chorus—“Just connect The Battery / Disconnect The Battery” over and over, a mantra that serves double meaning for both the connected and disconnected mind. It sashays into “Your Own Imagination,” a loping, lo-fi guitar ramble that is enchanting in its own right. “Easy” slinks along like a slow trickle of condensation making its way down the side of a bottle of beer warming in the sun, a heady and intoxicating take on Tom Waitsian drawl.
“Chxrm Bracelet” is less an instrumental interlude and more a study of the way sound encroaches on our environment and collides with our subconscious. A similarly inebriating psychedelic spin, “I Hear Barking” harkens back the textures and dynamics of “Your Own Imagination” as COMBE comes in for a landing with the slightly off-centre strut of closer “Vow of Silence.” It’s a fitting final moment for a record basking in contradicting sounds as its composite parts battle for pertinence and presence with each other. Oddly enough, COMBE does a miraculous job of quieting any internal clamour as well as diverting my attention from any external noise in my surroundings. It’s an unexpected audio treat that quiets and calms the mind.
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