Treebeard are from the same progressive post-rock stable as sleepmakewaves, We Lost the Sea and other similar Australian artists. This album, which is the band’s debut, was released two years ago and now being re-released.
Mystical sounds accompany the opening spoken sample. Rays of sound pass through. There is the sound of a beating heart. It takes a while but “Flatgates” expands dramatically and enters into smoky rock territory. Treebeard have laid down their marker but the direction is as yet not clear. Sombre sadness is brought into the equation next. “The Ratcatcher” has a nice lush guitar line but it’s a slow burner. The vocalist emits his message drearily and with a deliberate echo effect, of whose purpose I am not sure. It’s all very earnest. The build-up is classically post-rock. Not much to see or hear here really, and certainly nothing innovative in the ten and a half minutes of its duration. The somnolent and dreamy “Pollen” follows. The guitar playing is delicate and has a nice ring, but this was sending me into a trance. As per the formula for post-rock, the sound is amplified. I still don’t really understand why the vocals have to be so discreet, being buried in the background with an echoing sound effect. The song ends with a hubbub of sound but I’d lost the point of what Treebeard were representing here. “Nostalgia” is the title of the album and next song. It’s a short piece, relatively piecing, and does live up to its name, being wistful and reflective. Perhaps my reservation with this album is that nostalgia doesn’t make for particularly enlivening listening. “Nostalgia” isn’t necessarily about standing still but it is about looking back, so I guess Treebeard have succeeded in capturing that. It’s melancholic music for a grey, rainy day of the kind we’re having in the UK right now. So having given up on the idea that this was ever going to be bags of fun, I set about absorbing the net piece of mood music.
A sombre intro along the lines of that of “Flatgates” starts “8X0”. A bass line and to my surprise a heavy thunderous drum beat follows. The heavy riff has an air of fuzz rock about. This is more dynamic than what I’d listened to previously. I mentally pictured the band members throwing themselves about on stage. Mid way through Treebeard revert to type and take us through a melancholic soundscape, before pumping up pompously and increasing the intensity to finish. On a technical level, “Terra” is delicately and intricately played but its quiet melancholic tones didn’t reach out to me. Once again the song transforms during its ten-minute course, and after a note of urgency from the narrator-vocalist, the clouds darken and it cranks up a bit. Without disliking it I found “Terra” formulaic in common with much of this album. A dreamy vocal and soft guitar line bring us into “Dear Magdalena”. Nostalgic it is. It drags on. In my mind I was calculating the moment when it would transform into something heavier. Predictably this point happens almost exactly half way into this 7 minute 43 second track. Reverting to more expansive sonic melancholy, there’s a post-rock crescendo but what I were supposed to be uplifted about was lost on me. Duly mystified, I listened to the final notes before embarking on the final part of the journey “Nostalgia II”. Our English-sounding narrator provides a prolonged detailed explanation for two and a half minutes before launching into what sounds like a semi-epic close-out passage. Surely not, there was five minutes to go. Musically it does break out but essentially the same rhythm holds it together until the last minute when we drift away into the cosmos or somewhere.
I didn’t really get much out of this album, I must admit. “Nostalgia” as a title does fit the bill for the most part, and the opening speech gives us the context of a changing world, but although it’s nicely played, the album didn’t fill me up in any way. I found myself listening to something familiarly post rock in a distant and objective way, and as a result my technical appreciation of “Nostalgia” never turned into inspiration.
(3/10 Andrew Doherty)
Leave a Reply