Review Summary: quality post-rock
The Evpatoria Report are a Swiss post-rock band whose original tenure ran from 2002 to 2008. Their name refers to the Crimean city Yevpatoria, where the radio telescope RT-70 P-2500 is used to send messages into space that describe human life, otherwise known as "the Evpatoria message". Their second and final album
Maar, refers to a broad, shallow crater caused by a magmatic eruption. It is difficult to put words to the strange and ethereal music that The Evpatoria Report creates – especially since they are entirely instrumental – but the band does a great job at summarizing the general aesthetic of their music with the album titles and song names that they choose.
The Evpatoria Report's instrumental lineup is standard enough for the genre: two guitarists, one bassist, one keyboardist who also plays violin, and a drummer who occasionally dabbles in post-rock's favorite toy, the glockenspiel.
Maar is just over an hour long, with four tracks that run between ten and twenty minutes. The opening number,
Eighteen Robins Road, features my favorite crescendo buildup of the album right at the beginning. For five minutes and fifteen seconds from the point when one starts the album, some barely audible keyboard drones slowly escalate into some insistent, rhythmic guitar-chugging, with an accompanying snare pattern and cymbal-bell tingling. Finally, at the point when neither the listener nor the musicians can seem to bear the pressure any longer, the drummer finally starts crashing on the bows of his cymbals, and the guitarists let the chord progression ring out in forte.
I'm sad to report that I was unable to procure the significance of the title "
Eighteen Robins Road", other than that it's most likely an address. The other three track titles seem to have clear implications of the songs they represent, however. The second track,
Dar Now, likely refers to the small Iranian village Now Dar, which according to a 2006 census has a population of 37, with 7 families. As an American, I don't know firsthand what kind of effect the U.S.-Iraq war had on the citizens of European countries, but I get the feeling that this softer and more meandering track on the album was written by these eternally-neutral Switzerland residents as an expression of peace within a small area that is trapped within a country that is a part of a great war.
The third track,
Mithridate, refers to a mythical remedy, said to have been invented by Mithridates of Pontus in the 1st century BC, to cure poison. Mithridates himself was often referred to as "The Poison King" due to his affinity for poison.
Mithridate mostly consists of a combination of dreamy synth and guitar licks, which eventually lead to a sound clip from a British WWII program. The clip contains a scientist describing the results of an LSD experiment on British soldiers, which I learned upon further investigation was conducted to see if LSD could be used as an effective weapon, or "poison", against opposing troops. A few minutes after the clip ends, the music itself fades into a pool of muddled distortion, which given the context I take to symbolize confusion, or brain fog.
The final track,
Acheron, refers to a river in Greece, which in ancient Greek mythology was known as the "river of woe", and was one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld. This track, which is the longest on the album at almost twenty minutes, features a succession of buildups, crescendos, and decrescendos, before settling in the last six minutes with an alleviating succession of soft eighth-note guitar licks, that close this otherwise tumultuous album out with a flicker.
One of the first things I was told in my undergrad creative writing class was to make sure that every sentence works to progress the idea or the plot of the story. While I think
Maar is more comparable to a collection of four stories rather than one long novel, this is one of the only post-rock albums I've heard where I feel that every single note lends itself to the greater idea of what each track represents as a whole. The Evpatoria Report dabbles in the strange and unknown in a way that their contemporaries could only dream of replicating (if they weren't so busy trying to emulate the post-apocalyptic musings of Godspeed).
Maar is a wholly unique listening experience that I'm sure any fan of post-rock would appreciate.
