Long before post-rock meant vaguely emotive song titles and soaring, tremolo-picked crescendos, there stood a loose contingent of sonic provocateurs in the Midwest (namely Chicago and Louisville) approaching instrumental music from a very different angle. Melodic, jazzy, and clearly spirited with the twin gifts of improvisation and deft instinctual skill, legendary Chicago bands like The Sea and Cake, Tortoise, Gastr Del Sol, and even the more heart-on-sleeve acts such as American Football and Joan of Arc, were all toying with the notions of what made songs ‘songs’ at the close of the 20th century. In Louisville, iconoclasts like Rodan, Slint, The Shipping News and Rachel’s were exploring dissonance with ominous touches of chamber music. The music was alive and breathing in a whole new way.
Most of these bands are still hanging around, of course, as well as the direct descendents they’ve influenced in the jazzier side of post-rock’s second wave (Do Make Say Think, Collections of Colonies of Bees, et al). And from the opposite axes of Connecticut and Utah now comes a delightfully autumnal, stirring offering from Brundlefly & the Swede, bearing these forefathers’ traditions proudly in hand, while also gently nudging some of those tried-and-true tropes in bold new directions.
Cabin Music is flat-out gorgeous. Everything sparkles, with enough rich depth in the mix to make each instrument really stand out as a unique element of its own. It’s like dismantling a fine watch to see all the gears at work. These two long pieces make up some of the more purely beautiful music you’ll hear this year. Jason Socci and Matthew Kohnle, both late of the Tortoise-indebted Daybed, knit a gorgeous quiltwork of sun-kissed acoustic guitar, rustling drums, and some surprising bits of jarring noise throughout. The instrumentation is kept simple but never minimal, always bursting with robust energy from every conceivable boundary of the song. There are hauntingly beautiful touches of Spectorian strings blooming into life partway through the first long piece, just before we slip off to slightly darker and more melancholy realms. The first half ends with a Floydian/Frippian/Yes prog-rock space freakout that seems the ideal culmination of the pastoral beauty of before.
On the flip side, the second long piece wastes no time in getting right down to gorgeous, shimmering American Football chord changes and more of those luscious ascending strings. Touches of 70s retro synth slip towards a rather foreboding, stark piano interlude, quickly followed by more heart-on-sleeve prog-guitar heroics and some subtle bursts of feedback noise, before circling around to the very starting theme again, dissolving into small drifts of halcyon memory.
If we’re going to be fair as far as disclaimers go, I might note that I was once a member of a Raleigh-based band that featured Mr. Kohnle on drums. That band was much more of the later school of post-rock, a genre I still enjoy even as I’ve long since moved into more experimental pastures. If Cabin Music is any indication, Matt for his part seems to have struck the perfect balance between emotionally-awestruck melody and jocular innovation, a long journey indeed since our days in the freezing storage unit. This is more than just one of the best ‘First-Wave Style Post-Rock’ albums of the year, it’s also one of the best albums of the year period. Bliss out and your dull commute will dissolve into meaningless ash. (Zachary Corsa)
a closer listen 