Monday, April 14, 2014

City of Heracleion – City of Heracleion

March 20, 2014 • Futurerecordings

Ah, post-rock—you are a strange thing indeed. Every time I dismiss the genre as old and boring and played-out, I find something different that puts a fresh spin on my perspective.

Which is kind of funny since City of Heracleion is a bit of a throwback to the days of long, suite-oriented pieces like Godspeed's first two albums: two long twenty-minute pieces focused on slow, extensive atmosphere-building and textural exploration. And they do a pretty good job at it, too; the soft-build-loud-soft-build-loud paradigm is milked pretty hard but they know where to put things and how they play off each other, along with some great melodies as well.

There aren't many surprises when it comes to the instrumentation, like the standard violin and cello, and why mess with a good thing? I'm not sure how I feel about some of the guitar, though; at a few points it's very heavy and distorted and cuts through the mix, and so feels a little bit overbearing and a bit out of place. On the other hand, the clean guitar sounds great, very spacey, without drowning the listener in layers of overdub or extraneous reverb. There's also a little bit of noisy, atonal synths to add a bit of an alien feel to the music, which is nice though I think it could be improved even more with some noise and/or sampling.

Okay yes, it's not the most compelling music of its kind and it may not be particularly original, but I think it does a really good job at what it sets out to do. And I don't mind a bit of throwback to old Godspeed (the music that made me fall in love with post-rock in the first place). It's great to put on and just kind of fade out to. I need to try to find more stuff like this to listen to.

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