Guitarist Oren Ambarchi and drummer Eric Thielemans collaborated on the ghostly Double Consciousness before reforming for Kind Regards. Comprising two numbers, Kind Regards feels like a loving throwback to Mike Oldfield‘s crisp, crystalline Tubular Bells series, and although it doesn’t pack the same punch as Double Consciousness, lacking both the originality and brio of the original, this new album nevertheless is an impressive mélange of instrumentation and ambience.
Thielemans utilizes tom-toms with untethered invention, particularly on the opening chimes of “Kind Regards (Conclusion)”; brash knuckle strokes over thinly spread hooks and cadences. The drums deviate from wickedly smooth to out-and-out anarchy, reveling in a musical soundscape high on energy. Recorded in Poitiers, France, in November 2023, the passages fill out the room in which they are recorded, catching the whistles, rustles, and echoes in the vicinity.
Australian-born Oren Ambarchi thrives on contradiction, imbuing the two tracks running over 20 minutes with contradiction, chord changes, and shadings that make a cabalistic whole. Both men play percussion, which goes a long way to explain the jagged, rhythmic textures heard on Kind Regards. It’s evident from the recordings that the two artists are in lockstep: two boxers circling one another, waiting for the other to strike.
Of the two songs, “Kind Regards (Beginning)” is the better realized and certainly the more emotionally complex, minor keys beetling through the forefront as if foretelling the end of the world as the listener knows it. Like all great apocalypses, ranging from Chris Marker’s photo-heavy La Jetée (1962) to Edgar Wright’s comfortable The World’s End (2013), nihilism bears a quantum of comfort.
Between the droning effects and samba-style drums comes a feeling of completion, certainty, even. It’s possible to discern from some of the telegram-style riffs the flavors created by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer to introduce the Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008). Kind Regards sounds strangely cinematic and could easily accompany an indie film of some nature.
Much of the groove, tempo, and sense of building tension stems from Thielemans’ drumming, which incorporates brushes, cymbals, and backpedals to drive the music along. The lightning punches behind him occasionally overshadow Ambarchi’s contributions. Still, when the two forces unite, as they do at the 19-minute mark during the first number, the two men sound like an invisible orchestra accompanies them. They don’t tone back on instrumental flourishes, as rock’s the White Stripes did on De Stijl. Instead, they use the open spaces to produce reverberations of a serene, almost scientific nature.
“Kind Regards (Conclusion)” is more up-tempo. Thielemans plays like Carl Palmer, pounding to the freneticism of Ambarchi’s lead. It’s a much crazier listen: the calm portraits of the ominous future are replaced by manic foot stamps, hi-hats, and a buzzing that likely stems from a pedal. If this is their way of continuing the apocalypse, they’ve jumped into a wasteland as fearful as the one T. S. Eliot depicts.
Sonically, the album struggles with texture, as too much is compressed, making for an intense, often overwhelming, exercise in sound. Free to perform the album onstage, the individual timbres will have more space to breathe and showcase the fullness of their individual part.
At 40-something minutes, Kind Regards is long and testing, but it’s never dull, considering the complexity of the musicianship. With this duo, the movements that bring them to this point of climax are more critical than the final section itself. Oren Ambarchi and Eric Thielemans have been kind with Kind Regards.