Lights Out Asia-In the Days of Jupiter

Lights Out Asia's 2008 album "Eyes Like Brontide" was a breath of fresh air in the stagnant, dying genre of post-rock. Instead of doing their best to emulate genre monoliths like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Explosions in the Sky, Lights Out Asia combined light post-rock guitar motifs with gentle electronica and brooding ambiance, creating something entirely their own. But the main strength of "Eyes Like Brontide" was not its originality, but its vibrance and constant grip on the listener's attention, a huge step away from the laborious build-ups and sweeping song structures of their contemporaries. When I heard the early samples of "In the Days of Jupiter", I was concerned that Lights Out Asia would be taking a step too far into the ambient direction, forsaking their interesting qualities for something less accessible. Fortunately, Lights Out Asia have pleasantly surprised me.

While "In the Days of Jupiter" doesn't have the same coherent theme of "Eyes Like Brontide" (Cold War era paranoia and suspicion), it still manages to tie its eleven quietly simmering tracks together by referencing space via song titles and overall sound. The opening suite of the first three songs seems to be about a journey to Europa, the first two entries symbolizing the slow drift through space with the album's new emphasis on piano and the group's trademark electronic ambiance. But it's not until 13 AM that "In the Days of Jupiter" truly begins to show the band's progress from their last effort. What begins as another lonely space song evolves into a constantly changing, brilliant song highlighted by Chris Schafer's distant, heavenly voice and wrapped up beautifully by a tactful post-rock explosion.

From that point on, the album seems to make it more and more apparent that this isn't Benn Jordan's "Pale Blue Dot", with experimental tracks such as "Then I Hope You Like the Desert" with its poppy-sounding vocal anthems, or "Shifting Sands Sink Ship"s glacial string arrangements. Rather than glaze the listener's eyes over with poorly structured ambient build-ups, Lights Out Asia continue to do what sets them apart from other post-rock giants; they keep the listener engaged by adding interesting arrangements, sounds, and hooks with impeccable timing in each of the eleven tracks. A chord change or a fade-in guitar or a piano melody is all the album needs to capture your attention and suck you into its gorgeous soundscapes depicting the peaceful space voyages like the one on the album's cover.

Lights Out Asia is a must-listen for anyone either looking for some very chill music or to those bored with the sparse pickings post-rock has had to offer over the last five years. Either way, I have yet another soundtrack for stargazing or browsing astronomy pictures.

Listen: 13 AM

The Flashbulb-Arboreal

On Soundtrack To a Vacant Life, Benn Jordan used his voice on three of its last.fm-destroying 31 tracks. And when he did sing, it was soft, timid, and insecure, perfectly capturing the heartache and nostalgia captured by that album. On Arboreal, Jordan's voice is present on five or six tracks, and on a few it comes triumphantly to the forefront to rob the guitar and piano of their melodic leadership and bring the song to a focal point.

I say this because, like on Soundtrack, Benn Jordan's voice is once again a function for the album as a whole: loud, abrupt, and sometimes abrasive, but never less than fantastic. Arboreal opens with the enchanting "Undiscovered Colors", but leaps into a full five tracks of loud, melodic electronica that doesn't let up until "Dread, Etched in Snow", a signature Flashbulb piano track. And from there, The Flashbulb continues with the same uncanny consistency and emotional power featured on Jordan's previous work, albeit with a darker, more drawn-out edge.

If nothing else, Arboreal is a summary of Benn Jordan's entire back catalogue. The idm influences return proudly to the forefront on much of the album, and spacey ambient passages from Pale Blue Dot make their appearances. On "Dreaming Renewal", Benn Jordan joins Bon Iver in proving that autotune can become an artistic instrument rather than a crutch. On the aptly titled "The Great Pumpkin Tapes", a jazzy guitar track meets gentle piano and wouldn't sound out of place in the cartoon for which it is named. And on the landmark "Skeletons", clocking in at over six minutes, Jordan focuses all the creative energy scattered haphazardly over 31 tracks of his previous album into one piece, with a vocal build-up, the loudest moment on the album, and a tear-jerking piano outro.

The bipolar artist behind The Flashbulb is the same one on Arboreal that most of us met in Soundtrack To A Vacant Life. The emotional punch is still there, striking the listener with jaw-dropping melodies at every turn and making unexpected musical detours through multiple sounds. But Arboreal is a maturation of that same sound, a natural development and a culmination of influences into what feels like one giant setpiece. It may not be as landmark, but it certainly is no less fantastic.

Buy It

Hear It: Dragging Afloat

More on Rosetta

So far this year, I've been pretty obsessive about three albums: Eyes Like Brontide by Lights Out Asia, Precambrian by The Ocean, and the Galilean Satellites by Rosetta, featured in my first blog. If you've been reading so far (haha! as if!) you'll remember that that album consisted of two discs, one spacey drone metal and one ambient, that could be played simultaneously to create a beautiful, layered effect. So I decided I'd post another song from that album, in its (instrumental) metal form, its ambient form, and in its gloriously combined form. At around 5:00 in, the sound gets so dense, it sounds like it's about to roar out of your speakers. You just need to hear it...

Absent

Download

Beta Aquilae

Download

Absent/Beta Aquilae

Download

Buy this album (hint: it's worth it):

http://www.amazon.com/Galilean-Satellites-Rosetta/dp/B000EWBN9Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1273716023&sr=8-1

Rosetta-The Galilean Satellites

So you know that feeling you get when you're floating endlessly through space, contemplating the meaning of the universe as you bridge the great nothingness between interstellar objects? No? Well me neither. But if I had experienced that feeling, I'm certain I would have been listening to Rosetta's gargantuan album, 'The Galilean Satellites'. Rosetta's sound can best be encapsulated in a quote from the band themselves: "metal for astronauts. Combining ferocious post-metal sludge in the vein of Isis and Neurosis with droning ambience, the 2-hour double disc set is quite a journey in and of itself. Upon closer inspection, the listener ripping the CD to their computer will notice that the post-metal first disc and completely ambient second disc have identical track lengths. The revelation to this oddity is that both discs are made to be played simultaneously, with the ambient disc providing texture and added depth to the droning ferocity of the first disc. The combined effect is something monumental in the genre (and yes, i know Neurosis did something like this years ago). While both discs are great on their own, combining the two creates a truly epic wall of sound that is unparalleled in its density and subtlety.

SONG TO TRY:

Itinerant

http://www.mediafire.com/?jxdzl2mtmb0

The enigmatic piano intro to this 15-minute monster is soon joined by clean-picked guitar and grooving bass, then explodes into the signature Rosetta sound with vocals and layered distortion. Like most pieces from this band, it's basically the same riff played over and over again with flourishes along the way, but the raw composing talent of the band keeps it from ever becoming dull for a moment. The overall effect this beautiful drone has on the listener is to absorb him into a sort of trance associated with post-rock or shoegaze. The piano can always be heard playing its relentlessly catchy melody under the fortress of guitar and desperate screams, and the ambient section at the end with spoken words fizzles out with a perfect atmosphere of loneliness and bleakness.

Band's Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/rosetta

Support this awesome band and get some great tunes all at the same time!

http://www.amazon.com/Galilean-Satellites-Rosetta/dp/B000EWBN9Q/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1272399100&sr=8-3