post rock 

Scintilla is an album released on June 7, by Portuguese post rock band Catacombe. With a remarkable style, and a groundbreaking sonorous cohesion, the group manages to conceive amazingly beautiful, resourceful and melancholic melodies, whose gracefully dynamic and dense, but mordaciously diluted atmospheres resonates over the imponderable surface of diligent harmonies, whose tenacious, but sober musical alignment rises beyond the elegant vivacity of its punctually flexible creative diagram. 

Forty-five minutes long, Scintilla has eight tracks: 1) Carrossel; 2) Esquizo; 3) Sparkles; 4) Reverie; 5) Alvor; 6) Balada; 7) Arruda; 8)Faux Pas; with a beautiful and delicate, though veraciously abrasive musical layout, Catacombe’s digressive and impenitent, but sensible style circulates within the framework of its own everlasting fugacity, displaying a serenity that navigates in the introspective gracefulness of a more dilated rereading of reality. With a robust artistic cosmogony that not only defines the density and the virtuosity of its style, but comprehends the essence of its technical extension, Catacombe presents itself as a very confident and experienced band, that really knows for sure what they have to do, to achieve what they are searching in artistic elements. 

Despite the fact that the band, mostly, stays in the conventional territories of the genre, they are exceptionally talented. The group’s musicality displays an abrasive heaviness and a moderate, though genuine savagery, that not only enlarges their creative possibilities, but also dissipates its disillusioned melancholy beyond the diffusive peripheries of a very organic, clean and salutary sound, whose disruptive dynamism definitely extends over the oblique ocean of artistic pragmatic tendencies the frozen acquiescence that revolves around the original strength of such beautiful and mordacious poetic tonalities. 

With decisively gentle guitar lines – that incorporates brutal and hazardous elements in the most belligerent passages – circulating under the vicinities of gracefully distinct and somber harmonies, Scintilla gradually reveals itself as a marvelous conception of tempestuous, but exceptionally cozy atmospheres, that elegantly defines in the boundaries of its impeccable style an interesting and splendidly captivating musical tenderness, whose practical sensibility fluctuates freely, and spontaneously gravitates towards the heart of the listener. Definitely, this is a fantastic album, that displays an extraordinarily sensitive creative abundance, that aggregates a more pungent, vital and organic musical ordeal into the genre. 


Wagner

post rock

Arda is an album released on June 7, by American post rock group Driving Slow Motion, from Forth Worth, Texas. With slow, but exceedingly intense melodies, the work is somewhat restricted to the basic elements of the genre; nevertheless, the style is ostensibly resolute and expansive, and the melodies are overwhelmingly impressive. With vague, but dilated harmonies that subdue the peripheries of its intricate and highly concentrated atmosphere, the overall musicality of the sound is felt as superbly simple, but sublime, and its graciously poetic density definitely delivers a creative sensibility that knows how to properly conceive a correct degree of minimalism. 

Almost forty-three minutes long, the record has ten tracks: 1) Far From Home; 2) The Way the World Was; 3) In Exchange For a Memory; 4) Windows In a Stone Wall; 5) Of the Sea; 6) Laurelin; 7) All I See Are Stars; 8) Shadow & Flame (The Deep); 9) Hallowed Hills; 10) The Dawn Voyage; with a slow and patient degree of creative passion, the group certainly displays a formidable and highly original degree of musical authenticity, that rests in very sober, but deeply graceful and resonant harmonies. With a salutary, but mostly diluted sonorous diagram, Arda reveals itself to be an effectively audacious and virtues collection of vivacious, though melancholic symphonies, whose imperatively genuine and sagacious ambitions conceives a mordaciously superior standard for the genre, carrying out a sincere and voracious creative resolution, that really seems capable of suppressing stylistic limitations and technical or rhythmic utilitarianism.   

Like an ocean of serenity that reflects the tenacity of a personal universe of tender and everlasting tranquility, the music of Driving Slow Motion is literally a sonorous version of paradise. With elegant, though sophisticated harmonies – and a complex sensibility that really understands the organic commotion of its creative and discreet synergy – whose impulses drive the melodies to an infinite horizon of colorless resignation, Arda certainly can be considered a majestic masterpiece, that not only rejuvenates the genre in its musical anatomy, but stylistically, designs a convoluted atmosphere of sound, that renovates its own hyperboles of introspective inventiveness. 

A great album by all means, Driving Slow Motion is a band whose immensurable and extraordinary musical disposition can give to the genre a more refined, positive and original sonorous outlook. With a highly graceful and vivid style – that leaves no place for generic creative commonalities, nor monotony or predictabilities –, Arda deserves to be qualified as not just one of the best albums of the current year, but as one of the best ever recorded in the recent history of post rock.  
 

Wagner

post rock / progressive rock

I'm not a gamer. The few computer games I play appear rather laughable to the die-hard gaming community. While some are occupied with first person shooting games and others conquer ancient online worlds, I build cities or have my Sim do quite normal stuff. On the other hand, I would like to make a game. I already have a few ideas. One of them is the game being stuffed with music, mostly to enhance the atmosphere but also because I think some artists create perfect music for this kind of stuff. And that takes me to Indian one-man project Mixtaped Monk, who recently released his new album. 'How To Live Inside A VMMORPG', a neat progressive post rock album.

The story behind he album is pretty neat. A group of gamers gets stuck into a Virtual Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, titled 'Tales From Skylar'. Unable to log-out, the group now lives in the game and faces real challenges. The eight songs represent different situations and one of those tracks is the best piece of music I've heard Arka produce. While opener 'It took Forever to Decipher the meaning behind it All' is loyal to the progressive guitar driven sound of Mixtaped Monk, 'We exist in a place Hidden away from the Stars' is a musical chef d'oeuvre. Moody and melancholic, this tune expresses something playful and soothing.

Although the music is slow, Mixtaped Monk comes up with rhythm and repetitive sequences over which he frolics with guitar solos. 'Rock is still Alive but We are not' is a great example of that approach. Driving on a pulsating bass and drums foundation, the guitars whirl and flutter. Here and there Santana comes to mind. Arka is one of those musicians who prefer high notes over droning bass lines and that might set him apart from most post rock acts. Instead of bands like Explosions In The Sky or Godspeed, Mixtaped Monk seems to be inspired by Mike Oldfield and Steven Wilson.

So, if you're looking for decent progressive rock music, I'm quite sure this album will satisfy your needs. I only wonder, as I do so often with one-man acts, what would happen if Arka turns this project into a live band. The songs are great, the atmosphere is spot-on and the overall quality of this release is certainly good enjoy to be enjoyed in a live setting. Perhaps we will never know. All I know is that 'How To Live Inside A VMMORPG' is another excellent set of compositions, destined to be explored and enjoyed by a large group of prog-rock fans.


Serge

post rock / experimental / alternative

Toska is an album released in May 13, by experimental post rock project Fat Old Donald, from the Czech Republic. One hour long, the record has eight tracks: 1) Ibn Ezra; 2) Tünde; 3) Larva; 4) Toska; 5) Comme il Faut; 6) Lájos Bácsi; 7) Rybba; 8) Neumann; with an enormously introspective, frivolous and dense style, and exceedingly proverbial, lugubrious and somber vocals that reverberates through a clean, vast and expansive perspective a fragile and depressive, but lucid musical cosmogony, the general sound delivered by Fat Old Donald in this sinister framework is slow, diluted and afflictive, and sordidly anticipates the sentient expectation of a darkness that gradually drains all palpable resolutions of life.   

With an interesting, meticulous and methodic style – that can be quite monotonous at times – nevertheless, Fat Old Donald really knows how to properly conceive an atmosphere of dense, restless and pragmatic uneasiness, whose frigid and melancholic guitar lines are gradually revealed to be the epicenter of an emotionally vague, pale and diffusive disturbance. With a sensible beauty that underlines the melancholy of its existential playfulness, the music found on Toska displays a formidable degree of sophistication and pungent audacity, though sometimes becomes redundant, opaque and lost in the endless repetition of a predictable formula.

Despite the fact that there is nothing too extraordinary about this album, Toska displays a virtuous conjuncture of qualities, and a decent degree of originality. The diluted darkness that comes out of the melodies – slowly trespassing a subtle level of beauty that gracefully indulges in the instinctive desperation dispersed by the harmonies – reveals a consistent degree of compositional skills, whose audacious, uncommon and hyperbolic creativity certainly provides to the muscular tissue of the sound a pervasively robust and cohesive musical density. Nevertheless, underneath this spectacular disposition of tormented artistic vitality, there is a sonorous and coherent anatomic contingence, restraining the monumental order of painfulness that integrates the inherent structure of its horizontal grandiosity.

Unfortunately, you will have to undermine your patience, in order to listen to this whole album at once; despite its deeply depressive atmosphere, though, Toska displays a uniquely proverbial and sincere radiance of detrimental, but veraciously artistic agony, on a very personal scale of lugubrious darkness. Definitely, an intriguing work that deserves to be properly felt, appreciated and analyzed, this strange and bizarre, but amazingly effective, fearless and original album proves all the way through to be one of a kind.   


Wagner

post rock/ ambient / experimental

A Moon Daguerreotype is an album released by Italian post rock band Goodbye, Kings, on May 27. Almost fifty minutes long, the record has eight tracks: Camera Obscura, Méliés, The Magician, Drawing With Light, Phantasma, Giphantie, Space Frame Natives, The Ancient Camera Of Mo Zi and A Moon Daguerreotype. With a methodic and exceedingly abrasive sound, the style presented by the band is thoroughly consistent, preciously sculpted and vividly intense. Although the sound appears to be generic at first, as the album evolves, a more authorial and genuine, though pervasively discreet layer of melodies reveals the brightness of its singular and fantastic grace.   

With a serene, but mordacious style, that intelligently explores excruciatingly dense and sober minimalist devices, the music of Goodbye, Kings departs from a delightful perspective of pristine sensibility. Displaying crystalline harmonies that delivers a formidable degree of audacious, though lucid experimentalism, the exceptional level of dense and sagacious musicality gradually revealed by the band showcases a virtuous level of originality, that, intermittently, leaves the listener amazed, in a great and unimaginable condition of euphoric rapture, hardly believing in the gracefully majestic sound slowly revealed, and splendidly appreciated. 

With a formidable and extraordinary level of authenticity, A Moon Daguerreotype slowly reveals itself a truly incredible state of the art work – a marvelously spectacular sonorous journey –, where deeply creative harmonies collide with the brutal strength of inflexible, but brightly sculpted colorful melodies. A wonderfully marvelous and aggrandizing work, whose originality inadvertently transposes musical boundaries with a great deal of audacious excellence, Goodbye, Kings projects the versatility of its groundbreaking talent in an ocean of irreplaceable sonorous elegance, sidelined with a perfectly consistent and solid artistic proposal. 

Definitely a majestic work whose profoundly instinctive originality makes the record a pleasant experience all the way through – besides its beautiful, delicate and poetic style – the sound present on A Moon Daguerreotype is never predictable, repetitive, nor tiresome. Without any fear of creating something entirely different, and developing a very peculiar and sensorial genre of music, exceedingly impossible to properly categorize, Goodbye, Kings has conceived this sensational album to open a new artistic horizon, a new atmosphere of epic grandiosity, introducing a more vivacious and sober element of sonorous sensibility, that certainly has all the potential to make them the next wonderful phenomenon in the worldwide arena of the underground scene. 


Wagner

post rock / post metal

noise rock / jazz / experimental

doom / sludge

psychedelic / doom / stoner rock

ambient

house / techno / electronic

dark ambient

ambient / experimental

electronic / downtempo

bandcamp

heavy metal

black metal / death metal

ambient

Audiobulb

​Serge

post rock / alternative / rock

Only a few weeks before Dunk festival kicks off again, so perhaps now is a good time to dive into some post rock. The vinyl version of this album by American duo I Was A Good Dream will be released by Dunk! records on May 24th and according to the biography, it will spark some excited conversations in the post rock scene.
I Was A Good Dream consists of Chris Anthony & Alex Glover. One of them plays drums, the other one does everything else, and judging from the music on this album, that everything else mostly consists of beautiful guitarscapes and alle the necessary post rock elements.

​Although I have to say, opener 'Forgetting How To Speak' immediately shows a heavy and experimental sound. With lingering soundscapes, this tune functions as an intro but the distorted guitars and unusual riffing, the song also tells you that this won't be an easy-listening experience. Then there is 'Words Dissolve, Your Voice Wanders', which does deliver the classic post-rock guitars, drums and atmosphere. This is one of those elaborate anthems which make post rock such an adore genre.

​'falling/running/mute' is a peaceful piano driven ambient tune. With this I see why the band has listen Nils Frahm among their influences. So are This Will Destroy You and Caspian, which might indeed be the bands that come to mind when you listen to 'Help Me To Recollect'. Blink 182 is on that list as well but I still have to discover their influence on the whole thing. Maybe it's in the excellent drumming but I can assure you, this is not punk rock. This is great post rock, with indie jams in 'You Left a Letter and a Song' and shoegazing ambient elements in closer 'A Blistering Reminder of Why You Are Where You Are'

In all, this is a pretty neat album, one every fan of post rock should check out. Yet, it also makes me wonder about the future of It Was A Good Dream. Here, they carefully flirt with experimental music. Will they continue that in the future of will they mainly focus on anthemic pieces of music. Either way, this will be a band to keep an eye on.


​Serge

electronic / post rock / ambient

Well, isn't this one of the most correct album titles in the history of music releases? Time does indeed fly and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Luckily, there is the divine gift of music, which can make it feel like time stands still or even goes backwards in time. I mean, halfway through 'Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop' I had a huge throwback as my mind wandered to Dunk! festival 2018, chilling and enjoying some neat post rock. That being said, this music by American one-man act Our Alarm Clock would fit perfectly on the small stage in Zottegem. For starters, it's post rock, but it's also electronica, quite often quite glitchy. It's also a bit shoegaze-y and very indie-y.

Our Alarm Clock is Ben Rosenbach. His message is one of love and you can definitely feel that in this music. Opener 'I'm Alive. I'm Here.' is a neat ambient tune, functioning mostly as an intro for that awesome post rock tune I mentioned in the opening paragraph. 'Pictures' is a gloomy, slow indie pop song with dreamy vocals, almost like a light version of Jesu, remixed by Autechre. 'Narrow Passages' raises the tempo a bit with playful percussion and shimmering melodies. I think this is my personal favorite here.

There is a total of twelve songs to be found on 'Time Is Short' and they come with quite a lot of variation. Throughout my first listening session, all kinds of acts came to mind. From ambient gurus like Harold Budd over downtempo geniuses Boards Of Canada to post rock giants like Explosions In The Sky or Mogwai. The combination between electronics and guitars comes close to perfection, resulting in massively enjoyable tunes like 'A Sealed Up Secret Wish' or 'Like A rising Tide'.

The most remarkable title on this releases is 'Looks Just Like Cameron Diaz', which coincidentally also is the most experimental tune, driving on vocal samples and soundscapes. In a way, it mostly functions as an intro for 'A Way Home', another blissful downtempo post-whatever tune. I have to say, I'm pleasantly surprised by this effort. Furthermore, I'm sorry, guy who hates us for writing ourselves into our reviews, but this album is going to accompany me during my late night writing session today. I'm sure it will have an effect on the story.

Anyway, this is a great album, one that certainly comes highly recommended!!!


​Serge

post metal / progressive

Just a few days ago, I was talking about the importance of cover art. This noble art alone has sold millions of albums. Heck, some of my favorite albums are in my collection mainly because of the cover. That's why I bought them back in the days, to overload my poor parents with the nasty covers of Cannibal Corpse, Death, Napalm Death and Sepultura. The right cover art says a lot about the respective album. It can make or break it, or at least raise some serious questions. In this case, the question is: will this loaf of bread taste fresh and delicious or old, dry and infected with fungus? And also: what would happen if I grill this thing with cheese. But let's focus on the music.

The biography throws some big names around. "For fans of: Neurosis, Cult Of Luna and Russian Circles." In a way, that is spot-on, be it for the fact that all members in Swiss band Orso keep their mouths shut while they play, and that is a huge plus in my opinion. 'Paninoteca' is loaded with instrumental rock music, heavy, immersive and atmospheric. Intense post metal passages abbreviate with lengthy post rock pluckings. To guide all these riffs and strings-flirts, the band enlisted an energetic beast of a drummer. His contribution adds a lot of drive to the music, which is a second plus.

The references to Russian Circles are plenty but I feel that Orso is not merely copying these post-metal giants. These songs, with an early highlight in 'Jambon-Beurre', come off as a bit more progressive and experimental. You can still bang your head to this, but you can also sense that there's more going on that just a collection of riffing. The narrative songwriting is close to perfect and the band shows confidence. Take the video track 'Mitraillette' for example, a doom infused tune which main riff will rock you off your socks.

Perhaps the only exception to the blend of post-whatever, is the short and spooky drone/ambient intermezzo 'Jucy Lucy', which introduces the magnum opus of this album, the long 'Monte Cristo'. The latter somewhat reminds me of Tiny Fingers or 65DaysOfStatic but it's also a typical Orso song. This far into the album you'll recognize these tunes as typical Orso tunes. Why? Well, because Orso have found their sound in an overloaded scene: a bit like Russian Circles but grittier, more experimental and unforgiving. This is a pretty damn good post-metal album.


​Serge

post rock

Leaving State is an album released in April 5 by American post rock four piece Rhone, from Chicago, Illinois. Forty-four minutes long, the album has eight tracks: 1) A Pause In Your House; 2) First Step On Land; 3) Drifter; 4) Look To The Ocean; 5) Deaf; 6) Submersed; 7) More Sky; 8) Cedar Springs; a beautiful record with intense, but serene and graceful harmonies, Leaving State has powerful and methodic guitar lines, that punctuates exceedingly majestic melodies, that are the general style of the band. An interesting album with a calmer and peaceful atmosphere, Leaving State falls into the normal category of the genre – being predictable to a certain extent – although the group somewhat manages to intelligently avoid generic musical commonalities, that produces a tiresome and lifeless sound, destitute of vivacious energy and authenticity. 

Despite the fact that there is nothing on this album that you haven’t heard before, Leaving State has a genuine, intrinsic and imponderable beauty, that rests on the simplicity of its musical tenderness. There are no great pretensions in the music of Rhone; their style produces a good, calm, quiet and practically transcendental sound, that revitalizes the spirit and the conscience, while displaying a formidable balance between proficient technicality and lucid creativity. 

With some somber, sinister and melancholic passages, Rhone is one of those bands whose sound incorporates a proverbial density, that hides a poetic beauty within the layers of its inspirational musical consistency. Displaying discreetly gracious, but sometimes lugubrious melodies, this album has excellent passages, that revolves around the uneasiness of the peripheral disturbances of its formidably exceptional standards of artistry, that remains highly impressive at all times. 

The creativity of the group is marvelously intense, and the elegant melodies are profoundly elusive and sensible. Definitely, the fabulous harmonies delivered by Leaving State showcases a very skilled and promising band, that exhibits all the necessary qualities to consolidate a lasting reputation on the underground scene. Rhone is an astounding post rock musical group, whose sensational perception and sensibility worked perfectly altogether to create this beautiful album, that certainly is one of the best in the genre released this year so far. 


Wagner