ALL OF A SUDDEN I MISS EVERYONE

My first ever foray into post rock. I admit, I first steered clear of the sub-genre of post rock, because of silly and completely inaccurate notions of the sound. I'm used to post rock being a label applied to noise rock bands such as Sonic Youth. Instead, post rock is devoted to creating beautiful soundscapes with music, eschewing standard song patterns in an attempt to make an instrumental journey.

All of A Sudden I Miss Everyone is an emotional album filled with long crescendos and lovely melodies that give way to moments of dissonant tension that recalls the attitude of 70s Crimson. The sound, however, is totally different. The guitars ar so richly layered you'd think Devin Townsend had stopped by to produce. The album brims with an epic feel, whether in it's loudest and most chaotic moments or it's most subtle and understated. It's not often that I find instrumental rock thought-provoking, but this challenges my relatively open assumptions of the limits of rock composition. This is every bit as moving as classical oeuvres, it just achieves that emotion with an entirely different approach. Classical buffs might scoff at the notion of this, but this Austin quartet is one of the few rocks groups that can successfully harness the human psyche without words. Only classical works ever seem to do this, so I was floored to think I had denied myself access to this sub-genre, which is filled with this music.

All of a Sudden is not perfect by any means, but it has moments of incredible beauty and the way that guitars, keys, and drums mix is some of the most original music I've heard in a long time. I usually do track by track reviews, but that seems pointless for an album like this. The songs, though different and spaced from one another, combine to make one fluid movement. each track has it's own compositional highlights, but it all sounds even better when appreciated as a whole. Considering this is where I started, I'd say this is an excellent place for newbies of not only EITS, but post rock in general. I highly recommend it to fans of ambient music (the aforementioned Devin Townsend comes to mind), and to fans of classical music who'd like to see a new app[roach to capturing emotion.

Grade: B+