Review Summary: The river’s safe enough.
It’s pretty sad that Europe doesn’t get as much credit for making good music. In fact, it should be the United States that should be looking up to the Europeans. When you look in terms of pioneering particular genres, UK, France, Italy, and Sweden seem to be the breadwinners of doing so. And perhaps Austria may have the chance to join the club. They have a group that’s further moving a less known genre by the name of Rika, which is moving downstream in the right direction with How to Draw a River, Step by Step.
While this group is just debuting in this album, they seem to be having luck going in their direction. The genre of this music is a fusion of indie, alt, and atmospheric rock. And this combination is proving to work quite well. The music helps deliver enough of a punch to the listener to get their attention, but not too much that could take them off guard. The atmospheric presence also helps create some friendliness in this album, which is a plus in this situation. The alt and indie genres also mix together with the other music especially well too.
While the styles and genres of music are impressive, the band members as individuals are also pretty good as well. When you look in terms of expansion of genres, every member including the vocalist are making definite progress. However, if you look in terms of originality, intensity, or reminiscence, there is still work to be done. With the vocalist, his voice is quite calming already, but could still sound even more soothing. With the guitarist, the bassist, and the drummer, their playing sounds mellow and quite tamed, in which only a little refining, tune up, and a little more power is necessary.
Again with the genres; the indie and alt genres tie well with the album, but there’s a featured genre that’s even better. The strongest aspect of this album has to be the atmospheric mood/tone that can have you drifting off into a dream. There’s a point in every song in which the spacy music kicks in for a while, and allows for the mind to rest up a bit for the next instrumental section to drift in like a dreamscape. As another advantage, the slightly spacy rock aspect of this album has a complimentary tint of brightness in every song, a nicely paced tempo, and all in all, an avid listen.
All of this is why Austria has a chance. This is a chance for Rika to make a further expansion and evolve the atmospheric alt/indie rock genre that was recently founded. And How to Draw a River, Step by Step is a significant step of progress. Though further work and adjustments need to be made, for now, the river’s safe and Rika was able to cross it.
