Friday 25 February 2011

DOWNLOAD: Airs - Rainclouds Over The Remains of Hope





Airs
Rainclouds Over The Remains Of Hope


DOWNLOAD

In place of today's Fast and Furious Friday feature I thought I'd throw in a whole album of relatively uptempo shoegazey blackness becaue I've been building up the bpm, whilst keeping it fairly ambient and this is a record that does just that, confusingly so, and sometimes annoyingly so - there's every chance that just as you're really enjoying one of these tracks, they switch it up with something you will hate. 

That got you listening didn't it!

Formed in late 2009 as a fully instrumental outfit, San Francisco band Airs later added vocals to flesh out their sound - sometimes harsh, ragged and very much BM, at other times the are so soft and gently lilting I had to check their Metal Archives page at least three times to see if they had any female vocalists. No, they don't.  The two members of the band, Verwüstung and Xio bring seveal influences together that don't always marry up sympathetically, like the title track and Joyless, whose drive-time college-punk shoegaze (so help me I cannot think of a better tidy phrase for it, check it) gets crashed into by a wall of tremelo fuzz, doesn't quite gel - but when they do get it it sounds like it has huge potential;  Cast Into the Sea dissolves humid blackened gauzey metal into something even less tangible and more dreamy, the penultimate Passing is a slowly boiling fizzing sea of distortion and pulsing rhythm the truly evokes   On another release they also have a weird cover/homage/drag remix of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, that drops the original down a few bpm, shifts the pitch and plays some melancholoy keys over it. You should hear it. Here:





They are planning on taking to the stage some time this year, by which time they will hopefully have gelled all their inconstituent parts into one seamless and more convincing whole. This was probably all meant to sound more positive, but I wouldn't have posted if there wasn't something in here to get hold of.

3 comments:

  1. you could have 'shoeglance' instead of 'shoegaze' implying a shorter time before the tremelo fuzz destroys the absent minded eye wandering. Good download and will leave it on the PC at work for those upbeat moments....

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  2. hey Mike! It's quite nice isn't it? Nothing too ferocious about it. Good office listening for sure.

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  3. In place of today's Fast and Furious Friday feature I thought I'd throw in a whole album of relatively uptempo shoegazey blackness becaue I've been building up the bpm, whilst keeping it fairly ambient and this is a record that does just that, confusingly so, and sometimes annoyingly so - there's every chance that just as you're really enjoying one of these tracks, they switch it up with something you will hate.
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