Browsing Tag

Circa Survive

You Win Again Gravity – And the winner is….

Posted on 24 December 2017

The fabulously named You Win Again Gravity are one of those bands that more you dissect and try to unpack the music, the more you wonder just how they fit some many ideas, so many genres, bend so many rules and jump so many musical boundaries, all in such a small space. Grace and Focus is Tardis music, seemingly easily defined from the outside but mind-bogglingly expansive once you get inside the door.

Most post-hardcore bands follow fairly well defined lines, all grunt and no grace, all brutality and no beauty, You Win Again Gravity are just the band to redress such a balance. Yes, at their sonic far end they have no shortage of heavy, bombastic sounds and guttural growling, but what is more interesting than merely being amazed at their top end performance is how they get there. And they get their through musical textures which are progressive without being mere technical show boating, through the deft melodics that link between music set pieces, through meandering riffs which are interesting rather than histrionic. This is the sound of Post-Hardcore music growing up, finding its feat and joining the musical conversation. I guess we will need to find a more eloquent name for it now.

Colors In Mind Reach Music Peaks

Posted on 5 November 2017

If you draw a Venn diagram of exploratory music, where the intersection between technical metal, progressive and post-rock occurs you won’t find a whole lot of bands, but you will find Colors in Mind. With their latest release, Yugen Peaks they build their sound on a wonderfully fluid post-rock template, one that eschews the 4/4 signature and rigid verse-chorus ethic of traditional rock and instead wanders its own musical journey, often lingering in one lush musical landscape before flitting through more minimal territory, languishing in gentle, bucolic beauty and then climbing dramatic peaks.

It isn’t hard to see this approach as a modern day progressive classical music, the instruments may have been updated from the traditional format but the symphonic nature of the music is obvious to all. And l it tells its story as much through symphonic sound as it does the lyrics, it maybe be a less obvious, less direct method, but it is no less heart tugging, emotive and effective. It is music of the heart and soul, requiring total immersion. Whilst most music contains its own user manual amongst its beats and notes, one that tells the listener exactly how to interpret the message, this is more about osmosis, a vibe to be soaked up and ingested.