[Caesura begins]
Tape recorder is turned on...
[Jan. 2nd, 2009]
Yusif - OK, I’m a bit concerned right off the bat with ‘Hope Valley Hill’. It sounds eerily like Eingya… and don’t get me wrong, I dig my Eingya, but I liked to think Kenniff had struck a sudden chord with that record, where everything he touched had some zen-like power and found a well-earned niche of ardent followers. ‘Hope Valley Hill’ makes me wonder if more pretty post-rock is really going to be this guy’s ceiling.
Ryan - Understood. And that was his big criticism last time around… his tunes lacked tension, what some referred to as “sonic wallpaper”.
Y - But [Hope Valley Hill]’s climax was a thing of beauty! Maybe not so different but still acknowledgeable. In either case, Helios raises the bar with ‘Come With Nothings’, featuring a staticy bass note for tempo that crosses into some lovely acoustic tones.
R - I feel like I’m in a garden right now. The dewiest garden of all time. But this unprocessed drumbeat that jumps into it all just gave a very humane vitality to what was before kinda synthetic-sounding.
Y - Haha, you know what? Now that you mention it I think everytime I’ve listened to Helios I’ve been in some mental-garden as well. Looks of grey clouds, light rain, occasional bouts of sunshine gloaming across the hills?
R - Yep, that’s creepy. Let’s not compare dreams anymore… we’ve been hanging out too much.
Y - Not enough! Mind-reader! Dream-reader!
R - We’ve missed a lot of track 3 thinking about this. Moving on, ‘Glimpse’ was pretty standard stuff eh? Nothing poked out at me, really.
Y - I agree, and this is the kind of thing I was talking about: the whole pretty vs empty argument. Some people live by this stuff, the ambient-electronica that delves closer to new age sentiments, but others find it unchallenging. And its true, Helios songs do force a given mood upon its listener, guiding you so to speak, instead of letting us follow our own instincts. Closer to imaginary soundtracks than ambient.
R - That said, Caesura has probably some of the best unheard, Hollywood-ending songs in existence. ‘Fourteen Drawings’ was another crowd-pleasers for quietly dramatic chord shifts. Eingya was no stranger to the Hollywood-endings, think: ‘Bless This Morning Year’ or ‘Dragonfly Over Horizon’ or whatever...
Y - I’d say Caesura has some of the best potential indie-soundtrack tracks ever. Eingya’s were never that over the top, and [Backlight] is serious! No new-age here; this is dark shit! [Caesura] sounds more like staying-in-amid-winter-storms-music than garden-music, with more industrial undertones than before.
R - Then we picked a good night for this – look outside. It’s only a small blizzard but Toronto will still go into emergency-mode.
Y - This record is changing the feel of winter to me, which I find a bit disturbing! Here I’ve spent my winter months listening to music for being out in the snow, whereas this, like its cover-art, sounds better-suited or more suggestive of indoors, watching the storm from safety. Now I’m not saying it’ll one day replace Boards of Canada or anything, but Caesura is a great chill-out record. This is premium stuff for lie-on-the-floor zone-outs.
R – [Boards of Canada] is really good winter music! I wonder if everyone feels that way…
Y – You were telling me about a good winter CD a few weeks ago –
R – Yeah, Millimetrik. From Quebec. Super-good.
[‘A Mountain of Ice’ passes]
R - Can we listen to that again? There’s the dark material you were talking about. I dig how Kenniff got a bit dirty with the heavy guitar… went for texture instead of harmony.
Y - That was a great song – probably my second highlight so far – but you know the rules. Gotta go song-by-song. And I should say, each song has had a definite purpose. No obvious filler so far. ‘Mima’ was another slowburner and ‘Shoulder to Hand’ is showcasing some more of Kenniff’s sparse percussion. A few of Eingya’s tracks felt treasonous, having slipped from the ledge of pleasant and into schmaltzica, but Caesura seems more troubled… and possibly more complex than previous work.
R – Schmaltzica… nice. What do you think about Helios going back to instrumental on this disc, after the brief vocal-experimenting on Ayres?
Y - Hard to say… truth be told, I’ve yet to put my money down for that one. You?
R - I heard it once at Soundscapes; the vocals sounded fine. Completely serviceable for the Helios brand of post-rock. I recall liking the idea of Helios with vocals but, again, found the music to be a tad…
Y - unchallenging?
R - Haha, right.
[VERDICT]
Yusif – I found it pretty good on first listen. For me, textual beauty and tons of melody are slightly less important than the occasional, unpredictable surprise. So in many respects I anticipated this first-listen to be more relaxing than intensive. I’ll return to this semi-often, but more as daytime music. 6/10
Ryan – Sounded right on par with Eingya, which is pretty formidable comparison for a record I’ve only heard once. I feel a really delicate branching-out with Caesura, where the dew-soaked longing in Eingya – notably as life-affirming as its cover-art – feels subdued here – frozen maybe – amid the nebulous liner-notes and wintry-painted landscape. I’ll be reviewing this myself sometime when I’ve wrapped my head around it. Good first impression though. 8/10
