Album Review: Trees Speak – Timefold

As I’ve observed before, Tucson, Arizona isn’t the first place one would look for krautrock. But in 2024, it may well be the best place. As Trees Speak, Daniel Martin Diaz and Damien Diaz have been making original music with the character and flavor of that rock subgenre since 2017. Their self-titled debut album slipped by without my notice; I first discovered the duo and their work when they released Ohms in 2020. Then as now, I was quite taken by Trees Speak’s keen ability to breathe new life into a style of music that (a) had been quite influential and at the same time (b) not itself very popular. Ohms captured everything that was special about a particular slice of that music.

2021’s PostHuman was, for me, even better. So much so that I named it one of that year’s best. A year later the duo returned with another full-length, Vertigo of Flaws. Once again I found it – to quote the word I used at the time – “a stunner.” And yet again a Trees Speak album made my best-of list for that year.

By this point, I always look forward to a new album for the Tucscon two. And my expectations are high. So while I greeted the recent arrival of Timefold with enthusiasm, I tried to temper my enthusiasm: they can’t keep improving, album after album, without fail, I told myself.

I was wrong.

Much of what made Vertigo of Flaws so remarkable was the way in which the duo expanded upon its original brief, bringing in more sonic textures, widening their musical perspective while keeping it sharply focused. Neat trick, that. And they’ve done it yet again with Timefold.

There are at least two ways to approach the music on Timefold. One is to take each of its 17 tracks as individual pieces; the other is to experience the album as a pair of sidelong pieces. In fact the digital version is offered in both options. As a vinyl enthusiast, I’m taking the latter route here.

Side One opens with a pulsing, sleek sonic landscape reminiscent of early Tangerine Dream. Throbbing synthesizer washes create an atmosphere that suggests adventure with more than a hint of danger. Shimmering, buzzing, hypnotic sounds create an alluring vibe. Conventional elements like verses and choruses don’t figure into the recipe, but the music has forward motion; it’s anything but abstract. Sequenced lines flit in and out of the mix.

The music takes a wild left turn from there, adding in a simmering rhythm section with understated jazz-meets-motorik percussion and what sounds like real bass guitar. The synthesizers fly across the aural landscape. Some wailing saxophone peeks its head into the arrangement; in a flash, it’s gone. Wobbly acoustic piano arrives next, feeling as if it’s been run through a sequencer. Squawking, angular synth lines double the piano figures, and icy piano plonks punctuate the reverie; things have gotten weird.

At this point Trees Speak take another stylistic shift, creating music that leaves synths behind, instead sounding like the soundtrack from a French arthouse film of the ‘60s, with harpsichord at the center of things. The music for Roman Coppola’s CQ is the closest modern-day corollary to what the duo is doing here, and they’re even more effective than the band Mellow was on that album.

From there, it’s back to Tangerine Dream-styled synthesizer territory. But Trees Speak never sound like they’re lifting ideas from other artists; it’s just that they’re employing similar tools for similar aims, and creating something original in the process. Wide-screen sounds – the scraping of a piano’s soundboard, a delightfully loosely-tuned drum kit – dominate. And that just might be a distorted, space-rock electric guitar, a kind of David Gilmour meets Glenn Branca. That’s followed by treated, disembodied voices and some very unsettling Mellotron.

Whispers and wobbly synths suggest what it might sound like if one spun a Synergy LP that had its center hole punched off-center. A throbbing figure restates some of the album’s earlier motifs in a very different texture, providing a kind of conceptual continuity as Side One drifts toward its end. The inscrutable voices communicate an unknown message.

Side Two opens with a similar set of sounds as did the first side; the music is different, of course, but it feels related, somehow. There’s a less placid, more vaguely sinister character at work here, and Trees Speak make effective use of shifts in volume as well. Multiple melodic lines crisscross each other.

Next, the duo edges toward pop. A conventional rhythm section supports sequenced synth lines and a stirring melodic line. The music takes on a waltzing, regal character, serving up the feel of something big looming just around the bend… but never arriving. The music on this second side is broken into many smaller units, allowing just enough time for the musical ideas to express themselves, then away they go, making way for others.

An airy, placid and dreamy aural landscape reveals itself, with gliding glissandi and shimmering synth sounds. That’s followed by some disorienting sequences that swoon and sway. The music soon takes an abstract turn, with gauzy, trip-hop flavored drumming, buzzing and droning sounds and more disembodied, distorted spoken vocals. The sound of tribal drums being thrown down a flight of stairs – and then played properly, insistently, relentlessly – forms a bed upon which house-of-horrors synth lines are splashed.

French pop – meets Barbarella – meets Mellotron textures return, with what surely must be some actual guitar. Then – and for the first time on the album – Trees Speak lays down a simmering and sinister rock groove. It’s hypnotic, moody and tantalizingly brief stuff that suggests what Black Angels might create for the soundtrack of a ‘60s spy flick. Or something.

Electronics mimic the sound of machinery – and/or of ominously marching soldiers – while more ghostly voices try desperately to warn the listener of… something. But of what? Perhaps we’ll find out on the next album. Forty minutes in, it’s all over, and the listener is out of breath. But Timefold is a mind movie, a trip worth taking again and again and again.

It’s also the best thing Trees Speak has ever done.

Postscript: apparently, somewhere along they way Trees Speak released yet another album, 2023’s Mind Maze. I learned of its existence moments ago; at present I haven’t heard it. But I will hunt it down presently, and – no spoiler here – expect I shall dig it.