Apse - Spirit

by Simon T Diplock

Mysterious Americans mess with the genres

"Yes this is post-rock but ‘Shade Of The Moor’ sounds like ‘Kid A’-era Radiohead too, ‘The Crowned’ abuses digital noise, walls of melody, and fidgety drums, and ‘Earth Covers Us’ even pulses like the darkest dance music."

For a band that claim to have spent the last few years shedding all traces of their post-rock past, Connecticut outfit Apse sure follow the genre’s blueprints closely. Ok so their songs aren’t exclusively instrumental affairs anymore, and some of the stuff here has more in common with experimental punk than Explosions In The Sky, but there are still slow, smoky swells, passages of foggy ambience, turbulent atmospheres and thundering crescendos galore.

Opener proper ‘From The North’ is a fine example. Yes band mainman Robert Toher drifts in and out of earshot and there is a hypnotic, almost tribal rhythm to proceedings but there’s no denying the song’s steadily increasing scope and familiar quiet/loud dynamic. The calm-after-the-storm gloom and ghostly wails of ‘Legions’ and the distant echoes of ‘Wind Through The Walls’ are post-rock through and through too. But the band aren’t talking complete rubbish when they claim to have shifted gears.

‘Shade Of The Moor’ might go from skittery quiets to a skyscraping climax but it sounds like ‘Kid A’-era Radiohead all the way through, ‘The Crowned’ then uses digital noise, walls of melody, and fidgety drums to hammer hard enough to bring most post-rock pretenders to tears, and ‘Earth Covers Us’ even pulses like the darkest dance music.

In the end the band need not worry about their little white lie- they are definitely part of the post-rock family but whatever genre they choose to toy around with here, things sound rather special. And the best bit is that Apse finished this album a couple of years back so it can’t be long before they release more similarly mind-boggling yet beautiful material.

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