Aerial can’t be blamed for trying. On the Swedish group’s new album, The Sentinel, it does an admirable job recycling tried and true post-rockisms, but it fails to present anything beyond evanescence, reductionisms, and nearly ubiquitous 3/4 time.
Back when all this post-rock hoopla started, around 1994 or so, it wasn’t such a stifled affair. Post-rock forefathers Slint had already made their mark with the largely unprecedented album Spiderland.
Tortoise was flipping wigs all over Chicago with their protean anti-rock ‘n’ roll. Tortoise’s Bundy K. Brown had yet to make the boundless Directions In Music album. Sigur Rós was a mere glint in the eye of a few imaginative Icelanders. It was a time when it seemed anything could happen, when musicians born of punk had made a complete break from that movement and created one of their own.
Fast forward to 2007. The once-unclassifiable giants of the movement are now filed under the catch-all buzz word of post-rock. As in all great musical movements, once there is a template, diminishing returns are soon to follow.
A concert-goer can hardly attend a show without sitting through an opening act of ethereal guitar-interplayists and now-obvious dynamic shifts. Aerial fits well with most of the post-post-rock crop, and have exactly one trick up its sleeves.
Still, that trick is a pleasant one that plays well, and will attract fans of the genre. The Sentinel is less a collection of songs than a long piece of continuously shifting dynamics and dramatic, if lovely, melodicism.
Aerial’s geometric guitar constructions and occasional bits of dissonance, though not distinctive, are well written and listenable. Massive swells and crescendos permeate The Sentinel. Occasional vocals provide some needed humanity, and remind the listener that Aerial at least has sincerity on its side.
The two breaks from the formula are “Heads Gone” and “Youth and Student Travel,” both of which incorporate found sound pastiche and gentle noise, and neither of which signify anything other than a break in the album’s pace.
None of this music falls flat, and by its own limited standards, all of it succeeds. But The Sentinel does not stand up to scrutiny, and it becomes obvious upon inspection that Aerial is painfully short on ideas. The Sentinel should work well for post-rock diehards and any college student in need of pleasant study music.
– Mike McGovern
Aerial: www.aerial.se
Tangled Up! Recordings: www.tangleduprecordings.co.uk