F# A# ∞

The first post-rock album I've ever heard. I started listening to East Hastings, because this is the most popular song of the band...and I was fascinated. I gave more and more listens to this one and after some time I tried the other two as well. A great, undiscovered musical universe opened up in front of me. I got into post-rock and ambient (so, calm music) in the end of 2008, like I did it with (prog) metal the year before.

You will either love or hate this album, it depends on how you accept this kind of music. If you don't mind long and slowly growing compositions, you belong to the first category; if you do, forget about it. For me post-rock means tranquillity and deep cogitation about feelings.

1. The Dead Flag Blues: After the spoken intro (every song has its own one) enters a great string section, followed by a too long noise-gap. Around 11:00 somewhat bluesy guitars come in (source of the title?), which build up pretty harmonies. The sogn goes on into a cheesy 6/8 part then.

2. East Hastings: In one word, beautiful. The bagpipes start then a guitar-melody with haunting background effects joins in. At 4:32 starts the main melody (variant of the former), the drums make it even better. Then there's an orchestration shift, a cello part arrives, end then the admirable almost a capella vocal part (rarity!) containing the words ya da da da. Before the climax the instruments affiliate after one another, the speed is growing. After that comes the spoken word part with the repeated sentence they have a large barge.... The noises take over the song, the end contains helicopter and mosquito sounds.

3. Providence: The real opening is at 3:30 with the stunning cello solo. Especially nice is the background percussion playing, led by the tones of a glockenspiel. Eclecticism is a good word to describe the followings: we get some latin feeling with the trumpet, besides the monotonous drums, that give élan to the music. 10:30 seems to be the end, but then a strange, vibrant multi-vocal passage comes. The excellent leitmotif unfolds from the acoustic guitars to glorious violins and marching drums, as it ends, there's the simply marvellous, non-instrumental where are you going? section, with very emotional singing. 21:20 is also a fake-end, however, there is no sound until 24:50. The closing section contains echoing guitars, then a wild drum solo, finally everything fades out.

A real MASTERPIECE of post-rock.