Adored by fans of similarly inclined outfits such as Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Lift To Experience and Sigur Ros, this Austin, Texas four-piece return with their first long-player in four years. Not to everyone’s taste, the instrumental experimentalists purvey not so much songs, as elongated cinematic soundscapes. The lack of a vocalist however doesn’t seem to have affected their growing following and this six-track affair is widely anticipated.
Hard to see why – unless pounding, floor-shaking martial drums under ethereal heavenly guitars (‘Welcome Ghosts’) float your boat. Epic in every sense of the word, ‘It’s Natural To Be Afraid’ features even more distorted, other-worldly guitar textures in a Paris Texas vein. At 13-plus minutes it’s way too long for sure but the extended time is presumably designed to allow the listener to become lost and enveloped in the music. In practice, their dramatic tension is far more effective on the shorter pieces such as the closing ‘So Long Lonesome’.
Despite their reputation as torch-bearers of the new post-rock prog, it lacks the outrageousness of the ‘70s version of the genre and there’s an earnest sameness to these pieces that render much of it tedious beyond belief.