ALLELUJAH! DON'T BEND! ASCEND!

The return of the Montreal formation after nearly a decade of studio silence, though apparently they did tour around somewhat. A lot of water has flown under the Post Rock bridge during their discographic absence, and many of the pretendants to GYBE's throne actually took their place, had their moments of light, copying the typical Canadian post-rock sound, making it an every-day fixture in the alternative music circuit. And if the artwork looks GYBish, it still features as little as possible relevant info on its sleeve. Oh well, at least the obtuse attitude is still there.

Needless to say that GYBE's return was going to be a difficult one if they'd not moved on somewhat from a nowadays typical post-rock sound, one that is so passé, cliché and to be honest now totally redundant. To say that this album brings a whole facet to the genre and/or moves it forward even an inch would be an outright lie. It's quite the opposite actually, because there isn't much new under the sun, and this new album doesn't sound much different to their previous one. It's certainly sonically a tad different, because the production (was there any at all?) is somehow completely botched: it sounds like a mess someone would've recorded on a micro-cassette recorder from the crowd in a concert taking place in poor-soundproofed storage building. What's to say abiout the music itself , if only that it contains four lengthy dronal tracks, most likely spread over to vinyl discs but gathered on one CD. The usually slow never-ending crescendos and the equally long descendos are still there, but this time providing a sludgy and muddy wall of sound (much more so than theur first four releases), where it's difficult to tell who's doing what

Not sure these guys should've come back after such a long hiatus. They had left the scene as one of the artistic leaders (despite not being big sellers), but ten years later they literally come back to the race a with laps behind the EitS or Mogwaï, etc.. Does it matter to the listener and do the musos actually care about this?? Difficult to say from a formation that has never privileged normal communication, as the usual obscure cardboard sleeve is still as obscure and obtuse in terms of basic liner sleeve infos. Some things never change, but I'm not sure that in this case it's a positive thing. Definitely a let down for this writer, but I'm sure GYBE couldn't care less. Not bad per se, but hardly essential.