ON THE FIRST DAY

I borrowed this album from library after my research for unknown Finnish bands on the Archives. Soon I was deeply charmed by the music and felt happy of my discovery, since I'd be the first one to spread the word here. I even tried to contact the band but sadly it seems they are not active anymore. This 10- track debut contains extremely well done, fresh, Post Rock -flavoured indie rock sung in English. They have been compared to e.g. MEW and SIGUR ROS but are perhaps closer to pop (I don't mean they would sound commercial); the beautifully melodic songs stay economic and accessible, and yet they have a lot of dreamy, melancholic atmosphere and a cinematic rich sound. Everything's in perfect balance. Nearly too perfect for its own good.

Vocalist Aleksi Kaufman, who also plays guitar and cello, has a clean and sensitive voice that reminds me of the 80's pop artist BLACK known from the hit 'Wonderful Life', and of the singer of CRESSIDA. (There surely would be better, more contemporary references too which I can't spot right now.) The sincere delicacy of vocals is never buried under the Post-Rock grandiosity. The album has some sort of an Apocalyptic undercurrent beneath the light surface, and it's well captured in the cover painting too: the comfortably seated people wearing dark glasses are presumably witnessing a nuclear experiment. The lyrics are often quite sad and dystopic but wisely the music avoids sounding dark or depressing. The result is emotionally strong and beautiful.

As pleasantly as I was charmed at first, in the end I have to agree with the remark shared by many Finnish reviews (found via the band's stagnant homepage), that the album is "too orthodox" and lacks of greater surprises. The evenness of material and the atmosphere that stays pretty much the same throughout the whole album may become a problem on the long run. But anyway, what a waste if this extremely promising debut album will remain their last release.

I am going to propose, with all the weight of my vast influence, that new bands thenceforth issue EP's first rather than full length recordings. This would not have mattered so much in the LP era, but would ensure insufficient supply to inoculated us against their sound. Many's the artist that I find ingenious at first only to later acknowledge that they have blinders on of some type or degree, ie they tend to make the same mistakes over and over, but you don't tend to notice this on an introductory EP so great the excitement of a fresh new sound that is eventually revealed to be barely either. To some extent, that's what I now think about ALL WILL BE QUIET, whom I could have passed on the street 3 days ago and not noticed, and whose story is now fully written, or will be in a couple more paragraphs, as it were.

I was delighted with their self titled EP for its brief and thought provoking marriage of post rock and Indy pop, but on "On the First Day" I feel a bit of a morning after sugar hangover. Sure the sound is mostly the same but now I'm hearing 1980s drum machines and it doesn't matter if that's what they are because that's what I hear. Now I liked AHA well enough for one album, but they never claimed to be prog either. I hear somewhat muddied production that has faded as a novelty, and a sameness to the many tracks that are just fine in a bubble but don't stock their necks out as good post rock should.

Luckily, several pieces do stand out. The buildups in the split title track, the catchy "Writing History", the slightly epic "Until the End of Time" with a majestic outro, and the fully epic "Sinking Ship" that's bombastic all the way through are all thoroughly satisfying. Elsewhere, the unnecessary reprise of the CRIMSON-esque "Washed Away" and the derivative closer (I'm thinking BJH as template?) cap off a series of decent numbers that sadly outnumber the aforementioned.

It seems the first day for AWBQ was also their last, which is a shame since they are clearly better than most, just not enough so to keep them from going silent.