I don’t need to remind you that 2019 has already been an exceedingly impressive year for instrumental post-rock and math rock. We’re not even fully midway, and I can easily identify a solid dozen or so albums that will be in heavy contention for my personal top 50 of the…
The Viterbo, Italy trio The Chasing Monster came out of the gate on their 2017 debut LP Tales with an exciting blend of dramatic post-rock and narrative storytelling, surveying the conversations held between the last two people on Earth before life is blinked out. The strength of their debut landed…
I still remember the first time I played Fuck the Sun, Stone From the Sky’s previous album (yes, that’s actually what it’s called). What I don’t quite remember is what I was expecting but it wasn’t an expansive, droned out, psychedelic walk through sunlit hills, nature in bloom all around…
For a band that has been around as long as Japan’s Mono has, it’s rather easy to drum up simple and concise narratives surrounding every new release. There’s already a broad body of work and years of building up what the band and their music represent, and it’s rare at…
Few “programming” notes to kick things off here. First, apologies in general for this coming out later than it should. Life and stuff and stuff and life and more life and more stuff etc. Second concerns our friends at Post. Festival, which we hear was a resounding success! We plan…
It would be easy to expect most people to come into this wondering who Old Faith is, assuming they’re a fresh band hitting the scene with a debut record. And you’d actually be partially correct, but there’s more to the story where this Greensboro, North Carolina quartet is concerned. This…
As a music reviewer, it’s difficult to know when our proclamations will be proven right or wrong. The nature of the modern music makes a multi-album year and a new album every several years both seem perfectly normal (if not always ideal). This being the case, we can never be sure…
Even in a genre built on intentionally difficult aesthetics, metal vocals hold a special place of distinction for their divisiveness. Cleans aside, the world of growls, screams, gutturals, shrieks, and pig squeals is no country for the faint of heart and even the most trve, blve, cvlt, dyed-in-the-wool metal devotees…
“Math” has to be one of the most malleable genre prefixes. What other tag could somehow link the glimmering summertime anthems of Totorro, boisterous noise jams of Hella and coldly calculated technicality of Botch? And that’s not even considering how quickly the classification has evolved since the days of Drive Like Jehu, Polvo, Shellac and Slint. Yet, there…
The “jam” is one of those musical devices that walks a delicately drawn fine line. On one side are classics like Can’s “Halleluwah” or The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” both of which are defined by an embrace of improvisation, interplay and gradual evolution that keep the song fresh throughout a roughly 20-minute run time. But on the other side, you have endless journeys of gratuitous musical masturbation that create a significant imbalance of enjoyment between the players and their audience. Walking this line is obviously difficult; though defined by higher tier musicianship, an effective jam band can’t venerate their abilities as musicians at the expense of songcraft, particularly in terms of defining the genres and styles from which the extended composition is being drawn out of. All of this makes it that much more impressive that Mother Engine have not only mastered the “jam” formula, but excelled at replicating that equation fourfold on their third full-length outing Hangar, which we’re stoked to be able to premiere for you in full.
