In Stores Now: Signal Morning by Circulatory System

Illustration from A German Comic Paper by William DeLancy Ellwanger and C.M. Robinson, 1894

For me, sometimes the best test of "how good something is" is whether I feel like writing about it. And I don't really have anything to say about Signal Morning by Circulatory System, a music-making collective centered around William Cullen Hart (formerly of psych-pop experimentalists Olivia Tremor Control). To be sure, there are very few albums that sound anything like Signal Morning, so there should be lots to talk about - the problem is that there is one album that sounds almost exactly like this one, and that album is Circulatory System's self-titled debut album from 2001. Basically, it took Hart and his cronies eight years to remake their debut album without any recognizable variance in quality or style.

Granted, Will Hart has been focusing (as he should) on managing his multiple sclerosis in recent years, and this has had an effect on his musical output. I just have trouble getting past the fact that there's not really anything new going on in Signal Morning. It's an album of slightly off-kilter cut-and-paste psych-pop, played impeccably and assembled artfully. But everything on it has a direct analogue in something Hart has done before. The lyrical themes are all ones that he has explored at length in his previous work - you're not going to be shocked to see words like "joy", "blast", and "parades" in the tracklist. The sweet, Beatlesy vocals are still there, but diced up and processed nearly to oblivion. Horns and strings fade in and out of arrangements indiscriminately, but without ever feeling misplaced.

The credits on Signal Morning split the songs into "side one" and "side two", and the two sides were arranged and edited separately. For whatever reason, side one has a far higher detritus-to-pop ratio - it only contains three tracks that could be considered standalone songs, surrounded by six snippets. Signal Morning's second half fares better, boasting the album's three best compositions. The first, "Blasting Through", uses the trick of repeating a simple snippet of song six or so times, each time filtered through a different set of effects, but it's done really well here and doesn't sound repetitive. "The Frozen Lake/The Symmetry" has an interlude's title, but it is actually one of the most hook-driven songs on the record.

My favorite thing on Signal Morning, though, is the closing title track. Again, nothing really new going on here, but the acoustic strum reminds me of my favorite aspects of the Olivia Tremor Control records, and the use of the horn bleats in the arrangement is a nice touch. Given Hart's health situation, this may be the last track we hear from him for a while - Signal Morning may be more of the same on a lot of levels, but at least it ends on a high note.

"Signal Morning" by Circulatory System