The Shaking Sensations

Start Stop Worrying

Written by: AP on 02/07/2013 11:26:43

Over the past few years Denmark, and Copenhagen in particular, has given birth to a post-rock movement, and among the most prominent bands to emerge with it is The Shaking Sensations, who opt out of incorporating vocals into their music. The group recently signed with Robin Staps' (guitarist and songwriter for The Ocean) Pelagic Records, which for all intents and purposes tends to mean passing through stringent quality controls and thus bodes well for "Start Stop Worrying", the band's second studio album.

As is customary with post-rock, there is a time and place for listening to "Start Stop Worrying", which is designed for daydreaming, contemplation and meditation. Though by no means suffering from a lack of texture or detail, the album's sound emphasises the clean and serene, so one should not expect crescendos of crashing cymbals and distortion guitar - and in this respect The Shaking Sensations differentiate themselves considerably from their closest domestic peers in The Day We Left Earth or Late Night Venture, the latter of whom released an excellent album balancing the light and the heavy in "Pioneers of Spaceflight" last year.

The atmosphere is predominantly positive, as best exemplified by the uplifting opening track "Rocket Summer"; the six songs that comprise the album arranged in such a way that they beckon a simile: "Start Stop Worrying" is like a walk through the mist and dew of a summer dawn, music to soundtrack that blissful limbo that occurs whilst a city awakens from its slumber to embrace another day. As pompous as such a description may sound, this is the imagery my mind constructs from the reverberated, otherworldly soundscape at play here.

At times nearing shoegaze, "Anchors" and "Gild the Lily" send my thoughts toward My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, an understated beauty forming the foundation of the band's style. But alas, despite enlisting Matt Bayles (Isis, Mastodon) for production duties, he has not been able to push the band sufficiently in a personal direction, so even though "Start Stop Worrying" is a well-composed and consistent piece of music, much of it sounds borrowed from the likes of Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai and demands a touch of originality in order to be able to leave a truly lasting impression.

7

Download: Rocket Summer, Gild the Lily, Heavy Entity
For the fans of: The Day We Left Earth, Explosions in the Sky, Late Night Venture, Mogwai
Listen: Facebook

Release date 25.03.2013
Pelagic Records / Border

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