ECHOES OF YUL

It's a little difficult to describe this band's music but that's what music reviews are for so let's give it a shot. Basically these songs consist of pretty tight melding of some rather tame doom metal riffs artfully placed around a soundscape of post-rock inspired instrumental arrangements designed to produce a mood that's a bit too heavy and off-kilter to be considered ambient. And although this is essentially an instrumental album there are occasional vocals, most of which are largely unintelligible ranting, shrieks, or repetitive chanting with no obvious meaning. In other words the vocals are just a variation on recorded street and media sounds that were so popular with post-rock and math-rock bands in the late nineties.

And you definitely get your money's worth with this album as well with a playing time approaching the limit of its CD format.

As for the music I like the basic package and the direction the band is heading right from the first track "Midget", a sort of blending of tense ambience with explosive metal-inspired breaks that keep your attention rather than fade into background noise like so much instrumental music has a tendency to do. This is a short intro though, and the next track "From Infinity to Infinity" shows what the band can do with a longer track by stretching out the brooding passages and making the sonic guitar droning more of the focus rather than accent of the song.

The rest of the album plays pretty much as a series of variations on the ideas used in arranging the first two songs, as near as I can tell. For a really hardcore post-metal fan I'm sure there are nuances of difference that should be considered important like the brief grindcore throaty vocals on "Walking Skeletons" or the almost nauseatingly repetitive spoken word vocal track stating "after the third time, an angel comes" pretty much the entire length of "Third Time". But for the most part I just hear a lot of music that isn't really all that varied and that doesn't explore much new ground after the first ten minutes or so. The vocal snippets and other recorded noise are studio gadgets and don't do much to demonstrate the actual creative capabilities of the band members themselves (apparently a duo by the way).

So in the end I'm left thinking this is a pretty cool album and one that I'll more than likely be poaching a couple tracks from to add to my road-travel collection along with the few Green Carnation, Ulver and Dillinger Escape Plan that catch my fancy. This review won't help fans of the genre much, but if you are an outsider looking in and wondering whether this one is for you I'd say go ahead if you are a post-rock sort of fan who wouldn't mind a bit of facial jewelry and some dark moodiness with your soundscapes. Three out of five stars seems right; we'll see where these two take their sound on the next record.

peace