posted 10/15/2008 (Wed) @ 08:00 am
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Souvenir’s Young America - An Ocean Without Water (2007)
Post-Rock / Slowcore / Instrumental
Standard apocalypse and a touch of the blues
- Mars Ascendent
- Blood Alone Does Not a Father Make
- Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground
- The Sheltering Sky
- Invocation In the Caldera
- Coragyps Atratus (Ego te Absolvo)
Before Pandora introduced me to Souvenir’s Young America, I went through quite a few post-rock ensembles that didn’t quite fit the bill in my search for the kind of music a space station might play as soundtrack to their decaying orbit.
Explosions in the Sky? Red Sparrowes? Too busy. Godspeed! You Black Emperor? F#A#∞ is perhaps the definitive spooky tryst through an irradiated, post-humanity hell, but GYBE’s roiling, crescendo-baiting tempests of strings come off a little too urgent and orchestrated for waiting-around-to-die music. The American Dollar’s A Memory Stream (reviewed here) is certainly mushier and more relaxing, but its quiet burbles of electronica deprive the music of much of the hobbling zombie paced, lonely menace post-rock traditionally offers.
Souvenir’s Young America’s soupy mixture of urgent and slow spikes post-rock with “one man and a slab of wood” loneliness. Haunting tremolo guitar, depressive bass, tribal war drums. Echoing electric guitar tag teams with scrappy blues slide work and drunken whalesong wails. “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”’s bleary-eyed, pensive slide guitar is down-in-the-slums bluesy, yet spaced-out simultaneously. Errant harmonica colors otherwise epically standard apocalyptic adventures as “Invocation in the Caldera” black and blue.
Although there isn’t much to set them apart from droves of guitar-wielding armageddon-wishers who already play in this style, Souvenir’s Young America’s songs do stray outside the norm of post-rock’s usual fleets of guitars, with more unorthodox instruments shoring up their sound. As well, anti-modernists will rejoice at the lack of kitschy found sound so adored by post-rockers as a crutch for “ambiance” creation. At only six pieces (though each is 5-8 minutes long), SYA prove pithy composers, as well. Worth a look.
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Tags: an ocean without water, blues, instrumental, post-rock, slide guitar, slowcore, souvenir's young america, spacey
