Camoufleur

Front cover

File:Camoufleur-back.jpg

Back cover

Camoufleur is the fourth and final album by Gastr del Sol.

Track listing

		Title	Length
1.	A1.	"The Seasons Reverse"	5:51
2.	A2.	"Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder"	6:32
3.	A3.	"Black Horse"	5:24
4.	B1.	"Each Dream Is an Example"	5:41
5.	B2.	"Mouth Canyon"	3:47
6.	B3.	"A Puff of Dew"	6:20
7.	B4.	"Bauchredner"	7:09

Personnel

Cover art

The cover art is a drawing by Markus Oehlen, brother of Albert Oehlen.

Reviews

NME

January 24, 1998

Tommy Udo

It's a bit of an understatement to say that previous works from Chicagoan minimalist post-rock pioneers David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke were unapproachable. The 1996 'Upgrade And Afterlife' compilation, for example, is Gastr Del Sol at their tune-free best; the sound of a box of glassware falling down a flight of stairs in a very echoey building with a chugga-chugga swingin' Tortoise beat courtesy of occasional collaborator John McEntire. An acquired taste.

Between then and now, something happened. Perhaps, like Maoist composer Cornelius Cardew, who, after a stint working with Stockhausen and John Cage rejected the musical avant-garde as tools of bourgeois imperialism, they have realised the historic duty of the artist to serve the needs of the revolutionary proletariat. Or maybe they've just written a few good tunes lately.

'Camofleur', while not exactly their 'boy band' album, is a tentative step towards a world much wider than one solely populated by arts lab habitués who like dressing in black, sing along to the Hoover and watch the TV static between stations.

Opening track 'The Season's Reverse' is almost like a leftfield take on The High Llamas' leftfield take on Brian Wilson while 'Black Horse' sounds like the reincarnation of some post-Soft Machine '70s art rockers like Henry Cow or Hatfield And The North playing Irish jigs. This is unconventional - where else are the rock'n'roll possibilities of the hurdy gurdy so thoroughly explored? - but doesn't make for difficult listening.

The songs on 'Camofleur' have a warmth about them that Gastr Del Sol's more experimental work lacked; if anything, it's closer to the spirit of Can, who managed to push the envelope of what was possible in music. And like them, GDS prove that it's possible to do so without sounding like someone farting into an echo dek, to a trip-hop beat.

CMJ New Music Monthly

February 1998

Mike McGonigal

Artful, erudite and unrepentantly arty, Gastr Del Sol is among the most engaging groups of the post-Slint (please don't say "post-rock") progressive indie school. This is a rock band that's crafted orchestral compositions that are listenable, for chrissakes ("The Harp Factory on Lake Street"). Camoufleur is Gastr's breakthrough disc, exquisitely highlighting rocket scientists David Grubbs's and Jim O'Rourke's technical mastery of everything: organ; hurdy-gurdy; elliptical, acoustic guitar; total ambient noise. There's a pop sheen to it, as well. In the Pet Sounds-y "Each Dream Is An Example," the band transforms its heretofore "difficult" sounds into something breezy and beautiful. And while Grubbs's vocal style is still kind of clipped, it's never been more poppy or radio-ready as on the lush, gorgeous "The Season's Reverse," a dandy-ish, daisy scented after-hours treat. Camoufleur is one of those records where all the songs melt into each other. This dense web of sound effectively arrives already remixed, as it's manipulated throughout—both incidentally and blissfully full-on—by Markus Popp (of Oval/Microstoria) with computer-aided, loopy bravado. Popp's trademarked otherworldly tweakings help bring Gastr Del Sol's rich, decadent sound textures firmly to the forefront of contemporary experimental pop-sound.

Chicago Tribune

February 27, 1998

Greg Kot

A gorgeous pop album is likely the last thing anyone expected from these sonic explorers, but that's exactly what "Camoufleur" is. The album marks the end of the creative collaboration between David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, and it's a pity -- their music has never been so richly beautiful. The drones, austere lyricism, unconventional song forms and odd noises remain a part of the vocabulary, but they have been blended with melodies and orchestrations that suggest an avant-garde Van Dyke Parks.

Entertainment Weekly

April 10, 1998

Rob Brunner

On each of its three albums, this duo of Chicago experimenters has grown gradually less obtuse. Camoufleur is their most listenable — and ambitious — work yet. Built around two gorgeous ballads, Jim O'Rourke’s ”Mouth Canyon” and David Grubbs’ ”Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder,” the album still boasts plenty of weirdness (steel drums!), but only rarely does it interfere with the pure beauty of their sound.

AV Club

March 29, 2002

Joshua Klein

Camoufleur, Gastr Del Sol's fourth full-length album and the final collaboration between founder David Grubbs and wild card Jim O'Rourke, is not so much the pop record the two have been threatening as it is a slightly more conventional take on the band's trademark weirdness. After all, it's not like Gastr Del Sol's previous releases have been prohibitively unusual; the band has always served as a useful bridge between the stranger side of songwriting and the more accessible side of the avant garde, the ideal stepping-off point for those willing to explore what lies in the shadow of the great indie-rock precipice. Camoufleur's first track, "The Seasons Reverse," percolates with jaunty percussion, trumpet, steel drum, and lyrics that are actually sung, borrowing a bit from the off-kilter Brazilian music Arto Lindsay has been exploring. In fact, several of the songs here seem to reflect a new cosmopolitan slant: "Black Horse," for instance, vacillates between an implied Eastern European arrangement and a neo-Japanese melody, while "Bauchredner" sounds vaguely South Asian before abruptly veering into a relatively straight Western pop ditty. Gastr Del Sol retains much of its identity thanks to Grubbs' poetic lyrics, linear guitar drones, and languid piano playing, but this move toward more standard song structures, while not a radical revamp, sounds fresh and enjoyable. It's a shame that Grubbs and O'Rourke have parted ways, as Camoufleur promises new and exciting things in the band's immediate future.

AllMusic

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Jim O'Rourke's last album with Gastr del Sol is a subdued, meditative affair, bringing together elements of folk, jazz, film music, and the avant-garde. "The Seasons Reverse" opens the album with a deceptive, gentle melody and strummed, hushed guitars. Its sound and leisurely pace set the tone, but not the style, for the rest of the album. Each track is intricate and layered, but the music isn't overly complex. Instead, Camoufleur is quiet and minimal, requiring attentive listening. Only "The Seasons Reverse" and the closer "Bauchredner," with its unexpected, catchy horn-driven coda, are straightforward. The remainder of the album demands concentration. Given some time, the album opens up, revealing layers of modest beauty. It's a nice way for O'Rourke to leave the fold, and it certainly suggests that David Grubbs is far from finished musically, whether he chooses to continue with Gastr del Sol or not.

FactMag

April 20, 2016

MB

Gastr Del Sol’s swan song Camofleur found David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke re-approaching conventional song structures after having broken them down to microscopic level with their previous albums. The result blends their most dynamic experiments with their catchiest writing — granted, “catchy” is relative when you’re talking about a record produced by Markus Popp not long after Oval’s glitch masterwork 94 Diskont. ‘The Seasons Reverse’ explodes with ideas, letting dizzy percussion loops, steel drum and blaring organ and brass crash against each other while Grubbs’ surreal poetry skips over the top. The coda reveals drum claps to be children lighting firecrackers, recorded by O’Rourke and interrupted when they get wise and approach him. 'Blues Subtitled' playfully showed how Grubbs approached lyrics the same way many of his Chicago contemporaries silently pursued instrumentation. It’s also the pair’s best guitar record, pushing their always dense interplay to overwhelming complexity with the acoustic wormholes of ‘Black Horse’ and the closing 'Bauchredner'. That final goodbye builds an almost suffocating degree of tension with simply overlapping guitar lines before locking into a surprisingly traditional rock finale. It’s like one final twist — they could play like anyone, but chose to sound like no one.

Pitchfork

2018

Marc Hogan

At the end of "The Season Reverse," the opening track of Gastr Del Sol’s final album, firecrackers that sound initially like just another percussive element reveal themselves to be part of a field-recorded conversation with French-speaking children. Camoufleur reveals its other pleasures like that, too: gradually yet exhilaratingly. Gastr Del Sol centered around two avant-rock fixtures with impressive pedigrees, David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, and they often recorded with another, Tortoise’s John McEntire. Formed out of the fertile Chicago indie-rock scene in the 1990s, they became known for their complex, frequently acoustic explorations. Camoufleur united the group with yet another left-field luminary, Markus Popp of the electronic glitch trailblazers Oval. While not a total departure, the album is far more approachable than all these imposing bona fides might suggest. This is meticulous, introspective chamber-pop, unfurling a bit like Van Dyke Parks’ work with Brian Wilson. Drums bustle over an ambling quiet with thoughtful digital textures. By the time jaunty horns streak out of nowhere like sunbursts, across the final track, there’s a sense of having been entrusted with a deep and profound secret.