AS SEEN THROUGH WINDOWS

Post-Rock is NOT dead - until we have bands like BELL ORCHESTRE and releases like "As Seen Through Windows".

While the majority of genre's bands tend to grow heavier and mix their guitar-based music with electronics, some unique outfits progress in their own special way. Never a guitar worshipers collective, BELL ORCHESTRE examine the territory of bells, violins and piano sounds, inspired rather by modern Classical composers and Chamber Rock than by 80s indie or today's delay-tremolo-overdrive twins. Sometimes quirky and joyful, sometimes melancholic and academic, BELL ORCHESTRE's music is not everyone's cup of tea, but it's undoubtfully fresh and captivating. Highly recommended - especially for those who thinks Post-Rock is five bands that are good and thousand clones that are bad.

Bell Orchestre take their inclusion of brass and stringed instruments into their post-rock sound even further on As Seen Through Windows, and in particular they go all-out to bring jazz back into post-rock. I've never heard a post-rock release which shows so much influence from classic jazz except, if you count them as post-rock (and I personally do) the final two Talk Talk albums. Although a very few post-rock acts have incorporated jazz influences into their sound since Talk Talk's swansong, I can't think of any who have managed to recapture that particular mastery of jazz influences in a post-rock context; Bell Orchestre succeed admirably.

"As Seen Through Windows" is the second album of the Montreal based instrumental ensemble BELL ORCHESTRE. And it holds true to the local stage penchant for electroacoustic cinematic experimentation with melodic lines covered up by atonal slabs, electronics mixed with organic chamber-rock, post-jazz, and brass orchestrated neoclassic.

This album is full of inventive ideas and blends compositional, improvised, and textural music together in a very specific and imaginative soundscape. The production is top-notch punctuating every sonic aspect of the performance. BELL ORCHESTRE imbue each track with strangely beautiful surrealistic playfulness - and this is what makes their second album so enjoyable for a open minded listener.

This is rewarding and definitely recommended work for those willing to discover new deviant forms and contents of modern instrumental music.