Hans The Reluctant Wolf Juggler

There’s nothing really “post” about post-rock. At heart it’s two separate genres that occasionally interlock. On the one hand there’s the (sometimes transcendent) rock riffery inspired by having no friends who can sing (basically a form of sub-rock), on the other there are pastoral, harmonic soundscapes doused in strings and texture (basically a form of pre-rock).
The latter crowd are more interesting and should possibly just admit the truth – they play a sub-genre of harmonic classical music now dominated by soundtrack composers (the actual contemporary classical community have left such things behind in favour of concept-based atonalism). In their hands, guitars, organs and bass are just more instruments for a post classical string-ensemble and hints of “rock” are vestigial.
3epkano are very, very good in this terrain. They are supremely skilled at finding a melodic groove and then lushing it up to magnificent effect. Occasionally they nod in the direction of the less interesting post-rock riff-raff (most notably on ‘Rim Shak’, which eventually sounds a bit too much like the slow part of a Metalica song for my liking) but these elements are generally subsumed into a sea of well-composed harmony, an ever eerie mood and a surprising level of diversity.
Over the course of the album they veer from the cinematically rising chord sequences of the brass and vocal enhanced ‘Cat Strings’ to the Reichian patterns echoing and interlocking on ‘Not Now Steve’ to the pastoral/baroque twanginess of ‘Colonel Mustard’. Taken as a whole it’s beautifully atmospheric and divertingly lovely.