GENEVA

I tend to agree with the other reviews on this one. It's an okay album, but in it's attempt to garner new followers for the band, it seems to have lost the fire and heart that the previous two albums had. It starts off well enough with the first 2 tracks which have a lot of fire, especially the title track, and one tends to think Russian Circles have released another great post-rock album. The songs all sound good on the surface, but once all is said and done, it's hard to come up with anything here that is very memorable, groundbreaking or unique. Unfortunately, on this album, the band tries too hard to get a portion of the Mogwai followers, and instead ended up with an album full of a lot of surface music with no depth. The songs are mostly dark, but one track, "Hexed All" is extremely soft and pretty, but again, as nice as it is, it doesn't really leave anything behind. "Malko" even starts out with a nice beat that starts to build and up to a certain point, could have been a breakthrough single for the band, but it suddenly gets very dense. The longer tracks, namely "Mountain..." and "Philos" execute a great slow burn with a build up, but again, there is nothing new here. There is a lack of melody and feeling which is sad for what was shaping up to be an excellent band after two great albums. Again, it's not that it's bad, but it's not great either...only average and non essential. 3 stars.