Less ambitious and grand Godspeed You! Black Emperor, with a slowcore song stuffed in the middle of it, basically.

I love the parent band, pretty much unconditionally. I have all their albums, I have seen them live twice (that’s a lot for me) and I’m just a sucker for basically anything they make. I should eat this up.

And I sort of do, but I can’t help but feel that it’s both very, very similar to the parent band and, well, just not as good. (For one thing, this album is never going to sandwich me against a wall.)

On the original edition, they separated the sides into suites as usual, but in this case it makes even less musical sense than it does when GY!BE does it. (It often makes musical sense when GY!BE does it.) Here it feels entirely arbitrary. I’m glad the version I’m listening to dropped that conceit. It feels needlessly pretentious.

Efrim’s song slowcore song feels totally out of place. His lyrics are kind of what I imagine he would sing about. One of the reasons I love GY!BE is that they don’t have lyrics. I suspect their lyrics would be a lecture on socialism. This track sort of confirms that.

The track with the drums sounds like a thin GY!BE track.

But, all that being said, I still really, really like this. It is exactly my kind of thing I just can’t shake the aura of GY!BE which hangs over it. It’s like when the main songwriter of the band releases a solo album and it sounds just like the band, only this time it’s two (3?) of the members (plus guests from the band). In many ways it feels almost like GY!BE demos, if those demos were completed by only a few members of the band.

7/10