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A different kind of rock from Athens, Georgia An instrumental guitar band taps country and classical with a touch of quirk Japancakes
Giving Machines
(Darla) by John Diliberto Japancakes has been around for a while, but their new CD, Giving Machines, is their most coherent statement to date. This was a band originally formed to play one melody for 45 minutes, but they've apparently found a lot more since then. Based in Athens, Georgia, they're the descendants of a city rife with eclecticism and guitar-centric music--think R.E.M.--but they've expanded that frontier in a mixture of alt-rock, country music and classicism.

The opening track, "double-jointed," establishes the parameters with minimalist cycling guitars, high plains pedal steel guitar and Beatlesque strings. The pedal steel guitar playing off the strings on "Lalita" is a brilliant collaboration that evokes country roads in a cinematic array, as the pedal steel becomes a string section in itself. The reedy synthesizer lines they deploy throughout the album give it a strangely nostalgic hue.

Powered by insistent rhythms, Japancakes hang in a ground between ambient chamber music and ambient rock with touches of Penguin Caf? Orchestra whimsy. "Recovering Australia" is like a country air out of Ireland that will leave you breathless and in tears. Like many guitar-centric bands, shoegazer music is part of Japancakes' make-up and the Cocteau Twins loom large in their pantheon. They acknowledge the influence directly, covering a later Cocteaus song, "Heaven or Las Vegas," turning it into an alt-country jam.

A lot of people have an immediate negative reflex when you mention country, but Japancakes taps into a particularly atmospheric strain of Americana that places them alongside masterworks like Bill Frisell's Nashville and Moodswings' Horizontal. And despite all the name dropping in this review, Japancakes produce a singular sound out of these influences on an album that never hits a wrong note.