DATURAH

Daturah is a German post-rock outfit with an emphasis on a slower and more atmospheric way of playing. With three songs and an album clocking in at 45 minutes this will surely please the more casual fans of the genre.

In this self-titled debut this band prefers to take things slowly and with patience letting the spacyness take you for a ride and repetitive guitar lines to show you the way. This album is chuck-full of these ambient sounds and softer guitar parts in which both take most of the space in their songs. Like many guitar oriented post-rock like Explosions In The Sky and Mono, the songs always end up having a crescendo sooner or later and these songs are no exception. In the heavier moments they sound like Isis or other "post-metal" bands, but they always keep that airy feel no matter what (maybe because of the distortion used as ambient background in these parts, but whatever it is it works great). The mood is mostly melancholic almost sounding as if you were lost at space alone with voice-overs echoing in the distance like a desperate call to see if anyone will notice you...

In the end this is a great band that carries all of the traditions of Post-Rock that bands like Godspeed, Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky created. Nothing really innovative or daring. That may be the only problem I have with these guys, they need to take chances and create new paths instead of following the pack, but by no means a bad album to check out (quite the opposite, really). If you're looking for a band like Mono, Mogwai, God Is An Astronaut and others with a spacier, but still powerful sound, then Daturah is the band to check out.

3.5 out of 5

Post Rock seems to be a blanket category these days, under which you can sweep just about every twin-guitar band with a weakness for long, cathartic, soft-to-loud instrumental music scores. But this relatively new German quintet is something more than yet another GODSPEED-YOU-BLACK-EXPLOSIONS-IN-THE-MOGWAI-SKY clone. And their self-titled debut album offers an original twist to the usual Post Rock formulas, in this case filtering them through an atmospheric sieve of modern electronica and classic early Krautrock.

You'll find all the expected Post Rock tension-and-release crescendos here. But you'll also discover a perhaps unexpected level of compositional nuance and structure, well above and far beyond the standard clichés of the genre. Even at their fuzzed-out loudest this is a very disciplined outfit, with a healthy Teutonic respect for order giving their heaviest moments an air of tightly-managed anarchy.

Texture and dynamics dominate the album, from the haunting opener : Shoal" (with its slow, "Crazy Diamond" intro drone, gradually transforming over sixteen shoegazing minutes into an ecstatic wall of noise), through the evocative chord changes driving the powerful "War Machines", and finally to the aptly-titled "Lovelight", ending the album not unlike a final, glorious burst of sunshine under lowering clouds at dusk.

All three of the long tracks blend together like separate movements of a single 44-minute symphony, entirely instrumental (except for some ghostly voice samples) and in truth more attuned to a psychedelic / space rock aesthetic than anything else.

It would be a shame if such a promising band were to fall into a stylistic rut, always a risk with this style of music. But give them credit for a sterling debut effort, strong enough to build from in the future.