March 1, 2011 • Futurerecordings
You may remember hearing about The End of the Ocean from a concert post I made back in April. While I was there I was impressed enough with them to pick up a couple CDs they had for sale. While I won't say their studio material was as enjoyable as seeing them play live, it's definitely not bad stuff.
I know I wrote them off earlier as "crescendocore" which is often used as a pejorative, but here I think they actually do it pretty well. The style and mood is pretty reminiscent of bands like Explosions in the Sky, but the arrangements and songwriting are both more interesting. There is extended use of distorted guitar (65daysofstatic-style) and keyboards, the latter of which go very diverse with a lot of different voices used for support—strings, ambiance, etc. There are even some electronic elements like the beat in "Southern Skies".
The shorter songs are also interesting for post-rock. The opening and closing tracks both clock over ten minutes, standard stuff, but everything in between has a more urgent and polished feel to them. It's a nice contrast and it's good to see the trend of shifting away from boring buildups in post-rock (mostly) continue. Some tracks do have the problem that they don't really have a change to develop much or go anywhere, though.
It's tough to give a useful opinion on the album since I don't really listen to much post-rock anymore these days, but Pacific·Atlantic is definitely one of the better ones I've heard in a long time. Not ground-breaking or anything, but pleasant for sure.
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