Four years ago, I started to keep a complete list of every band I saw. Three years ago, I began kicking myself for not starting that childishly simple task sooner. Never mind. At least I can tell you exactly what I got up to this year – with one important caveat. A…
It’s getting chilly over here and so my heart naturally craves more moody and atmospheric music. But winter also gets me really excited, filling me with a feeling of freedom that the oppressive nature of summer leaves me longing for. That means that I also want emotional and expressive music,…
The inbox provideth. Trust in the inbox and it shall show you the way. These are words I whisper to myself when listening to the 50th terrible promo of the day from the blog’s email. I do it because, once in a while, it brings me something excellent. That’s really my main path to small, unsigned bands who are doing interesting things in the spaces of metal and beyond. Take Morrow for example. This unknown band from Seattle wowed me with their take on post-rock, atmospheric black metal and progressive metal with their The Weight of These Feathers. It’s an expansive and ambitious release, blending strings, furious guitars, impressive drumming, varied vocals from two vocalists and amazing, amazing (seriously it’s fucking amazing) bass work. I’m absolutely ecstatic to premiere one of the best tracks from the album today, “Elysium I”. Head on over below to get a taste for yourselves!
It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for emotional music. I listen to music to feel something and it doesn’t matter whether that something is good or bad. However, it’s also no secret that I tend to gravitate towards the darker side of the spectrum, often preferring melancholy to happiness, contemplation to joy and coldness to warmth. Luckily for me (and unluckily for those in my life that have to deal with my moods), there are plenty of bands out there who are more than happy to indulge my penchant for feeling depressed. One of these bands is Spurv, a fantastic post rock group from Oslo, Norway. They trade in the kind of classic post rock made famous by Mono and leaning heavily on those titans for inspiration. They’ve been around for a while and have made consistently convincing post rock in the interim of their career. Now, we’re proud to premiere “Es Blekt Lys Lyder” from their upcoming album Myra!
In 2016, the career of a Tokyo based musical project by name of world’s end girlfriend took a twist. The project, known for abrasive, dense and expansive musical spaces, released an album by the name of LAST WALTZ, adding a ton of influences into the mix. The result is an intriguing, compelling and challenging release that should only serve as the entry point to one of the most interesting careers in underground music. From collaborations with MONO to appearances in film and video games, world’s end girlfriend has experimented with the ties between post rocks, classical music, Japanese soundtracks, noise and much, much more. But it is on 2016 that we completely missed it and thus, it is the project’s 2016 release which we will highlight here.
It’s been a little over 4 years since both Eden and I joined Heavy Blog as fresh-faced, innocent souls who had not been completely tarnished by the world, and in that time the two of us have bonded over many things (understatement of the day). Although we share a lot…
There are musical moments in your life which change it immediately; you’re thunderstruck as an album which you just know will accompany you for years plays for the first time. This happened to me this week when a good friend recommended what he called “one of the most well kept secrets of post rock”. Now, I’m a simple man: if I see a title based on a science fiction book (The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel written by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson), I click. And goddamn, am I happy I did. Years of Rice & Salt haven’t released a lot of music but what’s there is simply masterful and none is more masterful than “Nothing Of Cities”, their 2011 release. It’s a moving piece of cinematic post rock which, somehow, manages to be small, moving, grandiose and epic at the same time. It’s crescendo based post rock that still has a heart and direction. It’s simply wonderful.
You might be wondering why there have been so many of these lately. Some of it has to do with backlog; post rock is a notoriously hard genre to parse, sparse as it is, requiring more time from my ears to translate into words. But some of it is also to do with the sheer amount of interesting post rock that has been released this year. The true beauty of the volume of releases is its quality and variety. There have been great releases from more “classical” post rock bands, like Heron or Ranges, as well as releases doing new and interesting things with the formula, like Afformance or This Patch of Sky. Alongside these younger bands, we’ve also seen the successful return of massively important bands like sleepmakeswaves and Mogwai who have continued to grow their sound and solidify their legacy.
We’ll cover these trends more in depth as we near the year’s end but, for now, it’s safe to say that there’s a spirit of revival running through the oft-beleaguered genre. Adding to this revivification which, if we’re being honest, properly started last year or even a year before that, are Australian Echotide.
This Patch of Sky is definitely of the third wave of post rock and this comes across strongly in both the music itself (replete as it is with buildups and crescendos) and the aesthetic chocies around track names and album art. As the band plunge deeper into their career (this is their sixth release), they seem to be harnessing their unique sound towards even more poignant and cutting evocations of the idea of longing, a wayward journey and then, finally, maybe, perhaps, a distant return. These Small Spaces is an exercise in the slow unravelling of these emotions, the contemplation of their often despondent tendancies and, perhaps, finally, maybe, a rejection of that despondence in favor of a mettled hope, a bedraggled optimism.
Just a little over two years ago, a pretty remarkable thing happened on this website. The veteran Japanese post-rockers in Mono were releasing two albums meant to compliment each other, The Last Dawn and Rays of Darkness, and fellow editor Eden Kupermintz and I were so inspired by both that we decided to work…
