Wes Borland Rises to Self-Imposed Challenges on ‘Crystal Machete’

After moving to Detroit and settling in to work on Crystal Machete, Wes Borland gave himself three rules: No outside help, no human vocals, and no distorted guitars. From there, he built the solo album he’s been quoted as saying he’d never make. In the hands of a lesser musician, we may have gotten eighty minutes of free-form jazz featuring a beagle as the lead vocalist; instead, Borland turns in something sounding more like a movie soundtrack, a professionally crafted affair that eschews his hard rock roots in favor of post-rock and electronica. Svalbard, at eleven minutes, seems to utilize all the various tools and instruments at his disposal for this project, a slow crawling foot tapper with a catchy drumline, that builds an electronica tension, relaxes, builds a little differently, relaxes a little more slowly, then eventually settles out into an eerie little spoken word piece which gets around his ‘no human vocals’ rule by, apparently, having his iMac vocalize a spoken word piece for him. Vltava, in turn, proves his faithfulness to ‘no distorted guitars’ as he opts instead to push the drum tracks through an effects gamut a la Prince, and allows a single unaltered guitar to pick its melodic way across a muddy