The Glasgow coma scale is a medical assessment tool, employed to gauge a person’s level of consciousness after a brain injury. It’s also the name of a post-rock band from Frankfurt, Germany. Why the band chose to name themselves after the assessment tool, we don’t know. Maybe there are some doctors involved here? Psychologists?
Sirens, the album at hand, is the band’s third full-length, appearing five years after its predecessor. Their debut album, titled Apophenia, was released in 2014. The band today consists of brothers Piotr and Marek Kowalski, responsible for guitars, keys, programming and bass, and drummer Peter Adamowicz. The latter joined the band fairly recently, for the recording of this album, because the previous drummer, Helmes Bode, had left.
The album’s six tracks, summing up to a run time of 45 minutes, offer pretty straightforward, chiefly instrumental post-rock. The soundscapes are multi-layered and built out of ambient sounds and various other programmed sequences, with clever guitar riffs on top providing hooks and appealing melodies played out on keyboards. Everything is connected and kept together by ever-changing rhythms. The music has a steady, relaxing flow, with some heavier parts along the way, but nothing really unsettling, nothing that would disturb the flow. After repeated listens, the six tracks blend into one big piece of music that has a pleasant, meditative, maybe even uplifting effect on the listener.
If you are someone who enjoys visuals with your music, you will like to hear that the band has produced a video to every track, and put them all together on YouTube where they can be watched in one piece. What the videos provide are 45 minutes of mainly aesthetically pleasing, sometimes slightly disturbing black and white pictures thematizing space travel, the importance of human touch, the beauty of dancing, modern life, and so on.
While there is nothing really to complain about here, there is also nothing that would lift this above the myriad of post-rock albums out there. Sirens is an enjoyable, relaxing piece of music, but I found it somewhat lacking in character – at least for an audience that favours the more extreme and weirder corners of music. If you are a new fan of post-rock, you might well be excited about this, but for the majority of the readers here Sirens will hardly ever rise above the status of agreeable background music.
(6.5/10 Slavica)
Leave a Reply