Pitchfork

Celebration's Katrina Ford makes Polly Jean Harvey sound like Sandra Dee, and you're not going to have much use for her band if you can't get with her swooping, mewling, grunting, cooing, slurping, yawping, yipping, trilling, whooping howl. Like Nina Hagen, Ford has the technical skill to sing anything she wants-- opera, cabaret, rock, whatever. And like Hagen, what she wants to do is to wail out unhinged, demented werewolf gurgles free of structure or accessibility. In short, she's a potential deal-breaker.

Celebration is the fourth band Ford has started with her husband, multi-instrumentalist Sean Antanaitis, after Jaks, Love Life, and Birdland. The couple seem to change their band-name every time they switch collaborators, and now they've found a new guy in drummer David Bergander. More than any of Ford and Antanaitis' past bands, though, Celebration seem to exist entirely to allow Ford to go as nuts as possible. Antanaitis and Bergander create off-kilter Halloween funhouse tracks, all spooky whistling organs and busily shuffling drums and unbalanced time signatures. And Ford uses the tracks as launching pads, unleashing her voice in all its glory. It's stunning and virtuosic, but it's not especially emotionally resonant.

Celebration are probably best-known for theur association with TV on the Radio; Ford sang on "Staring at the Sun", and TVOTR's David Andrew Sitek produced Celebration. Sitek also plays on the album, and Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone provide vocals. TVOTR are probably also the reason Celebration are signed to 4AD. Celebration has little of TVOTR's melodic heft or cascading warmth; they simply expand on that band's warped, proggy intensity. And that fractured sense of grandeur serves Celebration well; the band sounds something like 4AD's entire catalogue being chopped up and fed through a meat-grinder, those glistening synths and ethereal harmonies and lilting whale songs agonizingly mashed into an ugly, Frankensteinian chamber-jazz. Nearly every track begins with a deceptively calm and fluid keyboard melody before slowly piling on more and more elements, becoming denser and more chaotic while Ford gets further and further from anything resembling pop music. It's a neat trick, one that stays interesting over the course of the album, but don't expect it to keep you warm at night.