CODENAME: DUSTSUCKER

It's appropriate that Lee Harris, the drummer and percussionist for late-period Talk Talk, guests on this much-delayed second album by the masterful Bark Psychosis. Both Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis were absolutely key to the foundation of the post-rock subgenre - the term, in fact, was invented by reviewers scrambling for a way to describe the first Bark Psychosis album - but most of the second-tier bands who started playing post-rock once it had coalesced as a genre took their lead not from Talk Talk or Bark Psychosis but from groups such as Mogwai, Sigur Ros and Godspeed You Black Emperor, possibly because it was more readily evident how to mimic those bands' sound whereas Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock and Hex by Bark Psychosis seemed to be the result of brilliant, unrepeatable accidents.

Well, Codename: Dustsucker proves just how wrong that is, in that it manages to be a brilliant continuation of the sound of Hex which, if anything, broadens its horizons (there's some interludes which approach straightforward jazz) whilst at the same time beating most latter-day post-rock groups at their own game. In fact, whilst Hex suggested the manifold possibilities of the post-rock genre, Dustsucker does a far better job at actually realising their potential.