I Am Sonic Rain

Between Whales & Feverish Lights

Written by: DR on 21/12/2010 22:54:29

Ahhh, yes, another Deep Elm release for me to sink my teeth, or ears, in to. This time around we have I Am Sonic Rain all the way from Italy with their second album "Between Whales & Feverish Lights". They're actually from a small village by the name of Treviso, which is located fifteen miles north of Venice, and, like a lot of post-rock, draw influence from their surroundings, writing: "Treviso experiences humidity, clouds, rain and fog all year

long...and is an inspiration for the band's music as well as their name."

That influence, or inspiration, is then channelled through to their music and so you not only have the title "Between Whales & Feverish Lights", but all of their song-titles, too, are in someway related to nature. This is all part of their aim to give the listener an experience whilst listening, not just to throw crescendos after crescendos at you but to push the boundaries of soundscapes and to create songs that have a very natural feel to them.

If you know this genre well you should immediately think of Sigur Ros based on that paragraph; the Icelandic titans have obviously had a big influence here, especially in songs such as title track "Between Whales & Feverish Lights" and "Just To Rise The Day After" when IASR seek a more sweeping ambience. The underlying ambience used in "It Had The Sound Of A Long Goodbye" as a method to add depth to the coming crescendo is right out of This Will Destroy You's playbook (never a bad thing), but before you go thinking that this band are merely adapting ideas of others, that song lasts seven and a half minutes and most of it is spent exploring the sounds of a weeping guitar pre and post crescendo - it's focused yet minimalistic, and I don't think enough bands do that kind of thing enough.

"Between Whales..." is mostly an example of post-rock adeptly executed by a band with a personality and ideas, however, some of those ideas are under-worked or just plainly misjudged. "Fog Is Drowning Us" builds up, drops down, then builds up as if ready to explode in a climax, the drums and guitars teasing and teasing until... nothing. It was RIGHT THERE for the taking! There's a violent tempo change in "As Rain We Fall" as the song enters the final minute and a half, away from pristine build up and into some sort And So I Watch You From Afar-esque jazz-y, instrumentation - it's so sudden and forced, it'll leave you slightly baffled.

Those are the kinds of things that drop an album away from the "great" scores and down into the "good" ones because they interupt the flow of the album, and more often than not what makes a (great) post-rock album great is the flow of it. That being said, if you can work around those flaws, this is still a very solid, and often interesting, release.

7

Download: Just To Rise The Day After, It Had The Sound Of A Long Goodbye
For The Fans of: Sigur Ros, Explosions In The Sky, This Will Destroy You
Listen: Deep Elm Page

Release Date 21.09.2010
Deep Elm Records



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