DATURAH

Post Rock seems to be a blanket category these days, under which you can sweep just about every twin-guitar band with a weakness for long, cathartic, soft-to-loud instrumental music scores. But this relatively new German quintet is something more than yet another GODSPEED-YOU-BLACK-EXPLOSIONS-IN-THE-MOGWAI-SKY clone. And their self-titled debut album offers an original twist to the usual Post Rock formulas, in this case filtering them through an atmospheric sieve of modern electronica and classic early Krautrock.

You'll find all the expected Post Rock tension-and-release crescendos here. But you'll also discover a perhaps unexpected level of compositional nuance and structure, well above and far beyond the standard clichés of the genre. Even at their fuzzed-out loudest this is a very disciplined outfit, with a healthy Teutonic respect for order giving their heaviest moments an air of tightly-managed anarchy.

Texture and dynamics dominate the album, from the haunting opener : Shoal" (with its slow, "Crazy Diamond" intro drone, gradually transforming over sixteen shoegazing minutes into an ecstatic wall of noise), through the evocative chord changes driving the powerful "War Machines", and finally to the aptly-titled "Lovelight", ending the album not unlike a final, glorious burst of sunshine under lowering clouds at dusk.

All three of the long tracks blend together like separate movements of a single 44-minute symphony, entirely instrumental (except for some ghostly voice samples) and in truth more attuned to a psychedelic / space rock aesthetic than anything else.

It would be a shame if such a promising band were to fall into a stylistic rut, always a risk with this style of music. But give them credit for a sterling debut effort, strong enough to build from in the future.