Album review: Blueneck – The Fallen Host

Sophomore album The Fallen Host from Bristolian foursome Blueneck begins with mournful cello and plaintive piano, swelling crash cymbals and pregnant pauses; “(Depart From Me, You Who Are Cursed)” has a very indie-cinema-soundtrack feel, the sort of thing that should be playing while Paddy Considine strides moodily around a Yorkshire hillside. No obvious guitars, no narrative… but this is just the beginning.

“Seven” brings in low-bandwidth percussion, like the drummer got caught in one of Portishead’s echobox plug-ins, somehow. More distant piano, long chiming notes on loud and reverb’d bass, wailing single-coil guitar hidden deep in the mix… everything diminishes away almost to nothing, then smashes back in at full volume, like a monochrome Oceansize midsection or a maudlin Mogwai wig-out. Super stuff… though nothing I’ve not heard before, right down to the muted piano coda section.

“Low” evokes Bowie’s Berlin in more than just name, with Duncan Attwood’s voice echoing coldly and distantly off what sounds like the high glass walls of a city with a broken heart; later, the long second section returns to those thumping full-volume everything-at-once Mogwai aesthetics in a long slow crescendo which – quite incredibly – just keeps deepening and intensifying, long beyond the point of plausibility. It’sa journey deep into your own thoughts; set the controls for the sun of your heart.

Later still, “The Guest” is subtle and sweeping in equal measure; “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” pounds again with those bit-rotted drums and simple chiming piano figures beneath the wailing wall of guitar; by this point, it’s pretty clear that Blueneck are solidly within the sonic territories I would encapsulate with the term “post-rock”, and not even marginally so – it’s beyond canonical and into the realms of dogma, if that makes any sense, though that’s not meant to diminish its quality or listenability one iota. Obvious single (and excellent tune) “Lilitu” breaks the mould with floating perforated textures of tone and vocals that poke you in the heart-meat, and closer “Revelations” brings in some Siamese Dream superfuzz (albeit pushed to the back of the room behind the drummer) but as a whole, The Fallen Host is very much like the sort of thing you’d play to someone in order to sum the entire ill-defined genre in a single album: “basically, man, post-rock usually sounds something like this!”

[Of course, the same could be said of almost any other post-rock band, possibly because it is (at least at present) a genre predominantly concerned with expressing itself through its musical aesthetics rather than the style and antics of its creators, and that aesthetic is easily recognisable because it usually remains devoid of the obscuring false narrative of lyrical content. Or, to take the plum out of my cakehole: post-rock bands sound similar because they're all avoiding the same things. We recognise the void of rockisms rather than any defined quality or qualities of post-rock, you see?

Well, I'm plainly waffling, but when I get an idea I tend to just wander off with it... call it a misuse of editor's privilege, call it high amateurism (the dictionary definition, not the lazy diss), call it a result of listening to good strong epic music on a Friday afternoon just before wrapping up work for the weekend, call it what you like. Other review sites are available... but back to business.]

Blueneck, then, have a fine knack for evoking an epic loneliness, the delicate sound-sketching of vast spaces (urban, rural, or even ethereal) which feel like they’re populated by the listener and the band alone. Unless that’s a bit of Freudian projection on my part, there… but hell, whatever. I like music which I can get lost inside of, and this fits the bill beautifully.

Blueneck (like many others) may be desperately trying to shrug off the post-rock tag before it becomes a stylistic albatross, but perhaps they’d be better off using The Fallen Host to repitch themselves as a best-of-all-possible-worlds embodiment of the term. After all, if you’re going to use a band as a canonical touchstone, it might as well be a bloody good one.