post-rock
 |  Merchants Of Air shirt designs, check them out in the shop |
I've known Swedish post-rock masterminds pg.lost for a while now and I've always liked their music. Yet, with this new album, they give me a bit of a problem. As a fan of their previous works, I can highly appreciate their constant evolving music but as a reviewer, this is one tough mofo to write about. Why? Well, it's a post-rock album, vintage and definitely worth the tag "classic", but that's where the trouble start. How do you define "classic"?
Perhaps it might be worth stating that 'Versus' belongs right up there, right with the greatest albums in the history of the genre. Opener 'Ikaros' is a stunning earworm which immediately got stuck in my head, something which doesn't often happen with post-rock anthems. It's arguably one of my absolute favorites this year. From then on, pg.lost keeps up blasting high quality post-rock music in our direction, much to my delight.
'Off the Beaten Path' is another great piece of work, mostly mid-tempo but nonetheless quite immersive. This will get crowds shaking their asses off, I guarantee it. Those crowds will also become blissfully hypnotized by the gloomy shoegazing 'Monolith', especially when things get heavy and intense. For me, mid- and uptempo post-rock songs usually aren't as powerful as the slow ones but 'Monolith' is a smasher, that's for damn sure.
I'm not going into a full song by song description with this one, because I feel that this definitely is something you need to discover. Fact remains that pg.lost know quite well how to combine the necessary elements into awe-inspiring music, those elements being alternations between calm, clean passages and flashes of wildly distorted guitars, dynamic rhythms and subdued electronics, sheer power and pure beauty.
Like I already said, I'm not going into a song-by-song description, but I will mention the title track 'Versus', a massive and heavy track that dares to challenge Russian Circles. Quite frankly, the whole album can compete with the entire post-rock roster, mostly the heavily distorted ones. Even die-hard metalheads will have absoluty no problem banging their heads to this stuff. Well, maybe the ultra-extreme-harsh grind lovers, but let's ignore those for a second here.
In all, 'Versus' simply is a masterpiece and a clear highlight in a genre many people think is dying out. pg.lost managed to revive that awesome sound and bring new life into the whole scene. They won't be the only ones by the way. There are some other brilliant albums coming this year. 2016 will prove to be a year to remember as far as post-rock is concerned and pg.lost just placed themselves very high on the ladder.
Serge
Perhaps it might be worth stating that 'Versus' belongs right up there, right with the greatest albums in the history of the genre. Opener 'Ikaros' is a stunning earworm which immediately got stuck in my head, something which doesn't often happen with post-rock anthems. It's arguably one of my absolute favorites this year. From then on, pg.lost keeps up blasting high quality post-rock music in our direction, much to my delight.
'Off the Beaten Path' is another great piece of work, mostly mid-tempo but nonetheless quite immersive. This will get crowds shaking their asses off, I guarantee it. Those crowds will also become blissfully hypnotized by the gloomy shoegazing 'Monolith', especially when things get heavy and intense. For me, mid- and uptempo post-rock songs usually aren't as powerful as the slow ones but 'Monolith' is a smasher, that's for damn sure.
I'm not going into a full song by song description with this one, because I feel that this definitely is something you need to discover. Fact remains that pg.lost know quite well how to combine the necessary elements into awe-inspiring music, those elements being alternations between calm, clean passages and flashes of wildly distorted guitars, dynamic rhythms and subdued electronics, sheer power and pure beauty.
Like I already said, I'm not going into a song-by-song description, but I will mention the title track 'Versus', a massive and heavy track that dares to challenge Russian Circles. Quite frankly, the whole album can compete with the entire post-rock roster, mostly the heavily distorted ones. Even die-hard metalheads will have absoluty no problem banging their heads to this stuff. Well, maybe the ultra-extreme-harsh grind lovers, but let's ignore those for a second here.
In all, 'Versus' simply is a masterpiece and a clear highlight in a genre many people think is dying out. pg.lost managed to revive that awesome sound and bring new life into the whole scene. They won't be the only ones by the way. There are some other brilliant albums coming this year. 2016 will prove to be a year to remember as far as post-rock is concerned and pg.lost just placed themselves very high on the ladder.
Serge