Reviews

Fair warning: This album contains 13 songs and six of them have words. These guys are trying to be ambient in the music and willing to experiment but in a way with music, today, people’s patience gets worn out very quickly if something isn’t cookie-cutter or formulaic. While it is ambitious that the band is willing to try to test the boundaries and patience of their listeners, the music sounds a bit too close to other bands that are out now, for example Driving on City Sidewalks.

After the first instrumental, which isn’t half-bad, the band comes at you with “Convoy,” which thankfully isn’t a cover of the ‘70s staple but rather like a really short poem. Here are the whole lyrics, “Turning in the sun Petals on the lounge Dreaming of a lull and how the blue was young. There’s a convoy in the yard…” Think about it, won’t you?

“Tilling the Wind” is a bit better because the lyrics aren’t as convoluted. But it still doesn’t have the effect I believe the band would like it to have. Of all the instrumentals, the best one is “Cavalcade for Sundown,” where the music comes together beautifully and the band seem at the top of their game. The title track would be interesting if it wasn’t so long and actually led somewhere. The biggest problem, “(Ghost Notes)” contains about three chords and some background noise, not enough originality there for anything real in my opinion. The other decent instrumental, “Precipice” sounds a bit like Coldplay in the beginning before the band lets loose with the hardest sounds on the record thus far. The band’s ‘lyrics’ are really something to admire; behold, the lyrics for “Doorlight,” “The light, the door, now the paradigm is on the floor…” Wow!

While it’s incredibly admirable for a band to be trying new things, I feel that this record would have best been suited for a couple of EP’s.