CONQUEROR

Jesu's second album represents a brilliant blend of post rock, indie and shoegaze sensibilities. The sound here is unique and distinct, and works brilliantly within nearly pop-based song structures to create a maze of guitar chugs and lush vocal work. Jesu creates a near masterpiece full of spacey and open and flawlessly links distorted, downtuned guitar with octaved keyboard chords and heavy drummery.

The album is repetitive in parts, but is always incredibly beautiful even in its heavier moments; this is no mean feat, as many bands who work around guitar chug rhythms fail to create truly heartwrenching tunes like these without resorting to boring cliches and unnatural sounding emotion. What we are essentially given here is an hour of heavy post rock, with distinct textures and atmospheres to help define and separate this band.

This album is brilliant to space out to, featuring heavy use of delays and reverbs to create dense sound mazes. The opening track features a very post-rock sound, without reverting to the typical stereotypes many associate with the genre. Throughout it's 58 minutes, there are moments of beauty (Conqueror) great sadness (Weightless & Horizontal) and melancholy regret (Medicine). The lyrics on this album are incredibly noteworthy, memorable, beautiful and appropriate to the music. Take the lyrics from the longest piece, Weightless & Horizontal for example:

Try not to lose yourself I'm way past trying I'm way past caring I'm way past hoping

Try not to lose yourself You're always needing You're always hoping Wash away your tears

Try not to lose yourself

Truly poetic and beautiful, these lyrics are heartwrenching when combined with the brilliant melody and guitar work on this track.

Although brilliant in many places, this work unfortunately falls short of true greatness, and does not strike me as a masterpiece, but remains a brilliant modern album.

4 stars.

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