Pitchfork

The opening guitar riff and held violin note are pure film noir, all shadow and no body, affirming that the things you can't see are the most frightening. But the whispered stealth is temporary, quickly giving way to galloping drums that suggest instead a doctrine of overwhelming force. "Cossacks are charging in," Walker sings at the end of this short song's second act, "charging into fields of white roses." When he bellows the words you can see those figures coming over the hill in the distance, even though their place in the song isn't literal. It's quite a feat, to create a production environment so strongly supportive of a song's imagery, especially when lyrics are fragmented and resistant to snap understanding. Perhaps that's what happens when you work as slowly he does, treating each song as a pile of disparate parts in need of assembly, each sonic gesture waiting to be clicked into its proper place.