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

post rock/ neoclassical / experimental

Emitter is an album released in March 29, by British neoclassical experimental group The Pirate Ship Quintet. One hour long, the album has nine extensive tracks: 1) First; 2) Companion; 3) Third; 4) Emitter; 5) Fifth; 6) Wreath; 7) Seventh; 8) Symmetry Is Dead; 9) Ninth; a formidably exceptional and majestic album, with beautiful, inventive and creative harmonies, the music of The Pirate Ship Quintet can be classified as something of an otherworldly beauty. Its glorious splendor displays majestic melodic devices, that definitely captures and invites the listener to embark in an everlasting journey of sensible and delightful intensity, within an expansive and lugubrious universe of deliverance and rational grace.

An album that you wish never to end, Emitter has predominantly calmer and serene melodies, that underlines its own atmosphere of striking and profound vagueness. With an impeccable technical structure – that expands from the vicinities of its discreet, but mordacious neoclassical aspirations –, the audacious creativity of the band has no limits whatsoever, as you can hear saxophone and cello occasionally, marvelously diluted into the dissonant and almost somnolent horizon of a translucent, expressive and insurgent coldness. 

With a sonorous indolence that is essentially indebted to post rock, all the general additions the band has incorporated into their musical framework proved to be vital and exceedingly functional elements to conceive a very distinctive and singular style. One hour long, the album is never monotonous nor homogeneous; its fortuitous qualities impregnates the proverbially abundant tonalities of its horizontal creative line, that effectively dissipates over its sober artistic cosmogony such a superb level of authenticity, that it’s impossible not to feel astounded while listening this splendid masterpiece. 

A magnificent and highly impressive album – something extraordinary for a work that is essentially quieter, discreet and serene –, Emitter displays a graceful, even nostalgic, neoclassical atmosphere, that aggregates an interesting concept into its fundamentally unorthodox and unique musical features. With a profoundly innovative and original proposal, The Pirate Ship Quintet reveals itself to be a sensational and tremendously aggrandizing musical group, whose genuine sonorous identity is consistent enough to take the underground scene by storm. 


Wagner

post rock / alternative rock / noise rock / math rock

Now. is an album released on February 22, by Finnish alternative/ noise rock duo NYOS. A thirty-nine minutes instrumental album, the record has eight tracks: 1) Urgence; 2) High Five; 3) L.W.P.; 4) Zebracazebra; 5) Tiglio; 6) Mutante; 7) Death Star; 8) Aveiro; an interesting and abrasive – exceptionally authorial album –, Now. is an intriguing and sculpting experience on the alternative and noise rock subgenres, with a very peculiar sound, whose math rock melodies definitely increase their amazingly skilled and dry sonorous potential. 

With an audacity that insinuates itself at the epicenter of a singular diagram that envisions no limitations to its creative horizons, Now. definitely proves itself to be a very consistent, elegant and serious album. With a precisely defined style, its virtuous and imperative musical direction displays an artistic security that underlines an impressive and dominant degree of professionalism. NYOS is a marvelously sophisticated musical act, that understands perfectly the veracity of its meritorious grandiosity, and knows how to execute with graceful efficiency and majestic sensibility its delightful and inherently genuine perception of sound artistry. 

Since the album is relatively concise, its main musical statement also reclaims a modest and revolutionary degree of objectivity. Nevertheless, its genuine qualities and wonderful originality certainly makes this album a glorious musical achievement, whose sound navigates over the intensity of its own celebratory, restless and somewhat impulsive harmonies, though everything here mostly seems precisely calculated, premeditated and carefully sculpted. The song Mutante definitely has proved to be my favorite. Its volatile, nervous and highly concentrated density displays a cohesive degree of neoclassical elaboration, whose salutary and pragmatic devices overlaps its own vortex of utilitarian harmonious dissolution. 

Although the album has some minor moments of tedious passages, in a general evaluation, Now. is an excellent work of art, that has no faults or deficiencies whatsoever. Displaying a brilliant work merging several musical genres – and showcasing a sensational domain of math rock, upon which several harmonies were conceived – NYOS delivers to its audience a splendid and exceedingly sophisticated work, whose art and synergy are consecrated by its virtuous, incomparable and latent talent, filled with marvelous and innovative authenticity. 


Wagner

ambient / post rock

Moving Gently Towards an Ending is an album released on March 15, by American ambient music project Startle the Heavens, from Birmingham, Alabama. One hour long, the album has fifteen tracks: 1) Moving Gently; 2) The Sun Will Rise Without Me; 3) Against The Current; 4) Delicately Falling; 5) Without Destination; 6) Warmer Now; 7) Our Fleeting Youth; 8) Drifting; 9) Embittered Winter; 10) Fading Beauty; 11) Bury Me There; 12) Damp Violet; 13) Quiet Birds in Circled Flight; 14) Vibrant Bodies; 15) An Ending; a very beautiful album, with a splendidly peculiar and serene style of its own, Moving Gently Towards an Ending is a majestic work, that presents to the audience a succession of marvelous and gracefully conceived expansive cantilenas, that humanely shifts between the everlasting melancholy of a perennially diffusive existence, and the resignation of a life diluted in the tempestuous clouds of an eventful and lugubrious emptiness.  

The gracious melodies and the colorful guitar lines brightly dilute a scale of harmonies that delightfully expands its horizontal tonalities over solid precipices of omnipotent placidity; with a consistent serenity that never dissolves in the vacuum of its own dynamic splendor, the sound never becomes stagnant, nor monotonous. A virtuous and sensible originality departs from an increasingly elegant and coherent style, that definitely finds its way over a sonorous platform of liquefying and sober passion, whose intrinsic beauty demands from the synergy of its own meritorious grace the simplicity of gloriously sentimental anthems, dispersed in the horizon of a palpable fragility. 

With a sensible and characteristic style, whose splendor contemplates the vicinities of its own vivacious and salutary grandiosity, the music of Startle the Heavens displays an imponderable calmness, whose majesty naturally spreads throughout its soft, but cohesive sonority. With a methodical expansive layer that establishes its own authorial patterns over the musical tissue, Moving Gently Towards an Ending – in a general evaluation –, certainly deserves to be described as an impressive and deeply resonant album, true to its veracious and inherent intentions, radically defining original principles for the genre with which the artist develops so brilliantly.

Despite its extensive length, Moving Gently Towards an Ending never exasperates the listener, whatsoever. Gracefully exposing a series of marvelous, delicate and smooth melodies in a playfully gentle and sensible artistic conjuncture, the musicality displayed on the album has an imperative soul whose pungent consistence aggregates genuinely creative and audacious elements into its deeply expansive sonorous universe. Definitely, this is a lucid, sincere, sensible, resonant, delicately harmonious and quintessential ambient music album, whose honest, direct and illuminating qualities will thrill the enthusiasts of the genre.  


Wagner

post rock

Bloom is an album released in March 15, by American post rock group Minor Movements. Forty-eight minutes long, the record has eight tracks: 1) Speak Slowly; 2) We Dreamed to Each Other; 3) Bloom; 4) Clouds of Smoke; 5) Where You're Looking From; 6) Hamatreya; 7) A Light Above; 8) Breathe Deeply; with beautiful and intensely developed harmonies, the music of Minor Movements is characterized by a projection of expansive, introspective and cautious elements, whose slow – sometimes vague –, but playfully cathartic melodies deeply resonates within its own peripheral and sentimental fragility, accumulating in the vast hemisphere of its sonorous coalition a profound and methodic density, whose style is organically filtered by its own restless and volatile sensibilities. 

While the music is predominantly slow, is competently executed, and displays a degree of space efficiency that consistently energizes the sound, pulverizing it with a solemn and revolving expectancy. Their style is also dynamic enough to avoid monotony, and the melodies are vividly designed to reclaim a perceptive degree of virtuous lucidity, as they maintain a homogeneous tenacity within their context of derelict, calm and sober serenity, but showcases some degree of versatility underlining the melancholy of their vast, pervasive and disruptive ascendant inclinations.  

With a coherent, grandiloquent and magnanimous display of sound proficiency, Bloom reveals itself an intelligent, creative and visceral album, that gradually overcomes the shadows of its own hidden, laborious and restrained brutality, as guitar lines cautiously evolve to ignite a despondent aggressiveness, that little by little escalates, until its lugubrious essence takes the soul of the listener by storm. In a solitary landscape of infinite darkness – where the music that intuitively talks to your conscience dilacerates distant horizons made of everlasting sounds –, this album definitely conceives a personal dimension of splendorous rapture, where everything can be deciphered through a new perspective.  

A fantastic album with an uncommonly creative level of authorial virtues – that gets better and better as the work progresses – Bloom is a fantastic musical achievement, that should be widely celebrated by the audiences and genre enthusiasts. With a vigorous sonorous identity that highlights a wonderful level of originality, Minor Movements has certainly conceived this record as a succession of formidable and graceful post rock symphonies. Undoubtedly, a dispersive and elusive work of art; without any fear of being precipitated, I think it already can be considered one of the best post rock albums of the year. 


Wagner

ambient / classical

Sound In Silence

experimental / noise

alternative rock / psychedelic rock

death metal

post rock

ambient / classical

doom / black metal

black metal

hardcore

metal / death metal / metalcore

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post rock

From the band's biography: "We explore very different genres inside rock, post rock and electronic music and our main influences are: Mogwai, Depeche Mode, Trentemøller, The Cure, Sleep Party People, Massive Attack, Bonobo, GYBE, God is an astronaut, Apparat."
If you know me, and you a tiny bit about my musical preferences, you'll notice that this Italian post rock band has mentioned a few bands that I totally adore. The Cure, Trentemøller and Massive Attack all belong to my personal favorites too. Depeche Mode no so much but their appearance on this list made me extremely curious about this record.

So I pressed play and put my most recent set of Brieviews on hold to focus on this nifty little record. 'Night, Mr. Lenin' started to play and yes, there were the electronic elements, followed by spot-on post rock music. God Is An Astronaut came to mind and so did a whole bunch of electronic music gurus from back in the days. Another band that does something like this is Tiny Fingers and I love them, so I figured it would be only a matter of time before I'd love Irina Nëstor. Then 'Arpeggio Means Nothing' began, pretty much focusing on classic, anthemic post rock and leaving out most of the gloomy electronics. Instead, after a while this one even nudges to doom metal, causing me to start banging my head. 

All these elements certainly give the music of Irina Nëstor and interesting twist. On one hand it is playful and joyous while on the other hand gloomy, emotional overtones keep a firm grasp on the listener. 'Milgram', for instance, is a plucky, uplifting piece of post rock, driving on electronic beats and containing sweet soundscapes, but still there is something melancholic in the music, something I definitely love. And then, suddenly, it starts to rock hard and somewhat psychedelic and the electronics seem to go wild. Adventurous? Hell yeah, this band seems to throw surprise after surprise into your hearing holes, which obviously is a good thing.

I'm not going into a song-by-song description because that would merely repeat the two previous paragraphs. I think it should be pretty clear by now that this music is a breath of fresh air in an overcrowded genre. For the most past, Irina Nëstor can be seen as a high quality post rock band, one that experiments and plays with the unexpected. In a song like 'Hawaii' that something is indie rock and dream pop, in others it's something else. This is a promising debut from a well attuned and daring band. If they can keep up with this level of quality, both live and on future albums, this might become one of the new stars in the post rock firmament.


​Serge

post rock

Hypnic Fall is the latest album by renowned and legendary French post rock group MoYaN, released in February 13. A somewhat concise record – little less than forty minutes long – this marvelous work has five tracks: 1) Memories of a Spacesuit; 2) Flatearther; 3) Spacescrapers; 4) Hypnic Fall; 5) Chthonien; with beautiful harmonies, and a serene density that definitely understands the nature of its own sonorous and abrasive melancholy, the music of MoYaN is an energetic, sagacious and genuine lucid impulse, that engraves in the honesty of its simple, though miraculous melodies, all the pragmatic and constructive essences of the human soul.

Despite the fact that the melodies – at least in the beginning – appear to be relatively common ground features, there is enough musical sensibility here to project over its majestic and glorious artistic devices the discreet disturbances that hides within the restless festivities of the human nature. With strident guitar lines that screams vividly the fugacious essence of its imperative and artistically authentic ordeal, the sound prevalent on Hypnic Fall is a fragmentary delusional quest for a mordacious musicality, that circulates within the graveyard of a disruptive existence, always requesting the laments of the soul to watch more of its own incomprehensible delight. As the sound travels vastly through the everlasting cosmogonies of its own surreal and expansive sensibilities, the horizontal harmonies present on this album travel fast throughout a placid ocean of melodic possibilities, always flirting ostensibly towards the imponderable lugubrious vicissitudes and random poetic enchantment of the fugacity inherent to the group’s musical style.  

With organic proclivities that read the vastness and the ambitious grandiosity present in the melodies, Hypnic Fall displays to the listener a pragmatic and perennial sequence of marvelous symphonies, that circumnavigates the veracity of its own affable pleasure. With profoundly elegant harmonies that completes the primordial beauty of its inherent magnetism, the music of MoYaN is a salutary and effervescent graceful cohesion of intuitive creativity, that understands the precise nature of its sophisticated musical anatomy, whose main platform is an intricate net of heterogeneous sound, always ready to impress the audience with an unexpected density, that drives around the mythology of its creational audacity. 

An incredibly superior and fantastic, though intriguing and unpredictable album, Hypnic Fall is an arduous deliverance of original musical splendor, with an unprecedented degree of laborious beauty. With dense and precise, though somewhat diffuse and peripheral guitar lines, the music of MoYaN can be felt as a preexistent dream, wisely dispersed through the vicinities of an omniscient sphere of delusional, but everlasting grace, that once penetrates in your sensibilities, becomes a tender part of your existence, and will never leave you, as long as you live. Decidedly, this is one of the most fabulous and aggrandizing albums ever released in the genre, and its unparalleled degree of authenticity deserves to be recognized as the axis of a superb state of the art work.  


​Wagner

post rock

Heading Nowhere is the most recent album by Polish musician Maciej Sochoń, released in January 30, under the alias Seasonal. A fifty-five minutes work, the album has eight tracks: 1) Heading Nowhere Part I; 2) Headlights; 3) Heading Nowhere Part II; 
4) Rare Composition; 5) The Point; 6) Backgrounder; 7) Heading Nowhere Part III; 8) Heading Nowhere Part IV; with a very peculiar and characteristic style, that has simplicity and serenity as his main musical trademarks, the melodies and the harmonies of this album are almost silent and pungent embraces of diluted realities, intrinsically bounded by the inherent melancholy of the human nature. With beautiful, poetic and sensible vocals – and amazingly lugubrious and despondent guitar lines – Heading Nowhere is another fantastic Seasonal album, that brings about the best qualities of his creative virtues, with such a high degree of originality, that you instantly becomes enamored of this fantastic state of the art work.

With a wonderful calmness that circumnavigates the harmonious experience of its vast sensibility, the music in general is the quintessential hyperbole of an ordinary diagram of reality, though fulfilled by the sentimental charisma of pragmatic, beautiful and dense melodies. With a great level of subtle and graceful sonorous preciousness, and a somber outlook of proverbial originality, the music displayed in Heading Nowhere – despite its overwhelming sadness – is beautiful and unique; has an abundant colorful horizon pictured by the contingencies of life, and it’s grounded in a cohesive appreciation about everything that revolves around the fragility of human existence. 

 I sincerely don’t have anything bad to write about this album. Exceedingly fantastic from the beginning until the end, Heading Nowhere is an emotional and salutary sequence of marvelous symphonies, whose sound embrace in the consistent atmosphere of its benevolent melodies the excellence of the artist’s output on its most majestic grandiosity. Cohesive, consistent and elegant – displaying a robust diagram of recognizable sonorous features without being repetitive –, Seasonal reveals itself a profoundly mature and complete artist, that deserves to expand its reputation, with all the wonderful disposition that his music splendidly exposes.  

A sensational album whose captivating, dense and sensible creativity really has no delimited horizons or boundaries, Heading Nowhere is a fantastic experience for the lovers of a delusional, though acquiescent perspective on life. While the sound can be occasionally depressive, there is enough beauty and sensibility on this record for you to feel the vehement, pure and dispersive glory of life through the serene essence of Seasonal’s music, that seems always anxious to reenergize the spirit of life with a renovated rapture predisposed to read the universe, as well as the extraordinary aspirations so common in human’s eyes.  


​Wagner