You’d think that, logically, I’d find Station by Russian Circles an absolute breeze of an album to review. Why? Because I love it; it’s one of the best things I’ve heard all year.
But in the perverse world of music journalism (or possibly just the perverse world of my own mind, I’m not sure) the opposite is in fact true. Albums which I think are completely awesome are in fact the hardest ones to review, because I have to justify that enthusiasm to whoever is reading.
So I guess I’m best off starting with the bare facts. Russian Circles are usually a duo of drums and guitar, but for the purpose of recording Station – their second album – they roped in Brian Cook from These Arms Are Snakes for bass duties. It’s all instrumental; there are only six songs, but they take up three quarters of an hour, and join so seamlessly into one hermetic whole that you might as well be watching some sort of independent abstract movie whose makers neglected to do anything more than record an amazing soundtrack.
Ah, there it is – did you see my hyperbole creeping in there? I honestly can’t help it. Anyone who has visited my flat in the last week has been hustled into the comfy chair to have the opening arpeggio of “Campaign” blasted at them as loudly as my resident’s contract will allow. Granted, that’s a grand total of two people, but that’s still 100% of visitors exposed to Russian Circles whether they wanted to be or not. And Station got a 100% approval rating, too. I didn’t even have to threaten to lock anyone in the bathroom.
But will you like Russian Circles as much as I do? Well, I don’t know, I’ve never met you; but let’s see if we can’t work it out. Are you into music that tends to end up categorised under the ever-growing (and increasingly leaky) umbrellas of post-rock and post-metal? Do you like subtle sinuous instrumental rock music that moves smoothly from moments of crystalline delicacy to epic bludgeoning riff-pythons, simultaneously as intricate as a watchmaker’s toolbox and powerful as a sledgehammer on your kitcheware? Do you like music as landscape? If you have answered ‘yes’ to at least half of these questions, you should certainly give Station a listen, because it might just be right up your proverbial side street.
Not just because they originate from the same town have Russian Circles been compared to fellow Chicago chaps Pelican. Both bands have something uniquely organic about their songwriting and playing, a loose but powerful sense of growth and evolution, of progress, of progression. Neither are ‘progressive’ in the wizards-and-dragons sense, nor in the absurdly super-technical Dream Theater or Tool sense, but both have a depth to their material that is the result of more than just masses of distortion. Station reflects the Russian Circles live experience by using loops and layers of sound to build up a typhoon of sound that would sound impressive coming from a five-piece band, let alone two guys, a drumkit, a guitar and a loop-sampler.
So there you go – I’ve written four fat paragraphs that really don’t go very far towards explaining what Station actually sounds like. But there’s a reason for that; namely, it just can’t be explained. If you could sit down and – even with all the time and money in the world – bash out a piece of writing that could explain how exciting, liberating and cinematic a listening experience this album is, then we wouldn’t need bands like Russian Circles to make them for us.
And that would be a tragedy.
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Tags: instrumental, post-metal, post-rock, progressive, Russian Circles, Station, stoner
