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Bosch's With You
Dreams That Come A Thing
Рецензия сайта Crucial Blast
Оригинальный текст находится здесь.
Even with the global community coming closer and closer together through the internet, and obscure underground music reaching more people now than ever before, it can still be a difficult proposition for bands outside of the "cultural centers" of major Western countries to reach an audience. This is especially noticeable when a band from a country such as Russia has been around for several years with a couple of albums under their belt, and are playing music that is at least as good as their peers from the U.S. and Europe. Bosch's With You has been honing their own brand of ambient rock since 2004's Birds And Fishes, and it was with their 2006 album Defamiliarisation that I first discovered this band, thanks to our pals at the R.A.I.G. label. With a sound that harnesses the dreamy ambience of bands like Stars Of The Lid, Windy & Carl, and Landing, and incorporates it into amazing, instrumental epic heavy rock anthems, it's hard to believe that these guys aren't gigantic and being buzzed about by everyone that's into the whole instrumental rock sound. After listening to With Dreams That Come A Thing over the past few weeks, I've decided that this is probably the perfect album for someone to check out if they haven't listened to Bosch's With You yet. It's the first in what looks like a planned trilogy that the band will be releasing, and there's definitely a conceptual element to this album as each song is simply titled "Episode #1", "Episode #2", and so on, and all of the six lengthy tracks that make up the album flow right into each other as if one enormous suite. As with previous albums, Bosch's With You are entirely instrumental, and like all of the best bands that are doing this kind of atmospheric voiceless rock, they pack their compositions with heavily layered melodies and instrumentation and paint huge vistas of brooding sound out of chiming guitars, subtle washes of samples and electronic noise, slow, propulsive but very minimalistic drumming that sometimes locks in with a second drummer that breaks out the occasional tribal tom tom beats, and piano. LOTS of piano, which by itself sets this apart from much of the instrumental film -rock that I've been listening to lately. The music is slow and shoegazey, multiple guitars swirling into cloudy fields of melody, shimmering delay-soaked melodies streaking across vast valleys of drone, but then there are also a few moments on the album where the band picks themselves up from out of the fog and crank the distortion up, like on the soft swells of metallic guitar roar that can be heard underneath the interlocking guitar melodies on the first track, or about ten minutes into the second song, when heavier guitars and drums emerge and grind away at a hypnotic uber-catchy riff that sounds sort of like Swervedriver jamming off behind a veil of shimmering guitar feedback. No moment on Dreams... is heavier than the final track, though, which differentiates itself from the other tracks with a different title ("Hoarfrost"). The first part of "Hoarfrost" is a short, two minute bit of a lone acoustic guitar being plucked slowly, a forlorn, beautiful melody floating over electronic tones. But the second part loses the acoustic in a steadily nearing roar of amplifier rumble that takes a good three minutes to fully arrive, a dense distorted drone a la Sunn O))) or Earth 2, and then then acoustic shows up again, joined by creaking percussion and at least one other guitar, and suddenly the song becomes a kind of stoned backporch blues jam riding on waves of blackened doom. Very very cool. Over the course of the song's 12 minutes, the acoustic strumming and bluesy, folksy plucking disappears in and out of the shifting mass of crushing guitar drone, drifting out into fields of Sunroofy high end skree, then bottoming out completely at the end and ending in a wash of piercing feedback and muted noise. With that last half of the album, this becomes a new chapter in Bosch's evolving soundtrack rock, and all together makes for my favorite music from the band yet. Those of you who picked up Defamiliarisation from us and dug it need this one for sure. And fans of stuff like Red Sparowes, Sigur Ros, and Grails should definitely check 'em out as well. R.A.I.G. has been putting their releases in some really great looking packaging lately, too, and this album continues the trend: the disc comes in a 4-panel gatefold jacket with the disc attached to the inside on a small foam hub, and the jacket is illustrated in weird, storybook-style artwork.
