Review Summary: "I'm pleading for one more time with what I know now."
The rolling drum fills of
Filial that introduced us to
Pianos Become The Teeth back in 2009 are absent in the first jangly strums of
The Lack Long After. Then the song explodes right back in to the cathartic post-rock swells listeners have come to expect from
Pianos. The first thing you’ll notice on this release is that the songs are heavier and that the mix has cleared up. At times
Old Pride suffered from a muddy mix, which caused the songs to bleed into each other. This flaw isn’t completely fixed because the band’s songs still tend to blur into one another but the guitars pierce through the cacophony of bombastic drum fills and separate themselves from the vocal tracks better this time around.
The structures of the songs make more sense now. The climaxes are tighter and more elegantly executed. After opener
I’ll Be Damned peaks into its feedback screeching drum roll ending, you ask yourself, “how the hell they’re going to top this?” and they do. The disjointed nature of some of the tracks on
Old Pride are gone, nosedives in tracks come when they should, build ups are implied and led up to in the instrumentation.
The broken howl of Kyle Durfey sounds as pained as ever but there seems to be a little bit more variance in his screaming, including some really pretty harmonies. There are also some really well done breaks in the songs where the instruments go quiet leaving the screaming alone to carry the song.
One of the stand-out moments on the album comes on
Shared Bodies when the drums abruptly come to a halt leaving a mournful post-rock twinkle and the refrain, “But I think I felt more inside you then I would have liked!” that repeats until erupting into really beautiful breakdown. A similarly cathartic moment comes in the slow-burner
Liquid Courage that build into repetitive post-rock swelling that peaks higher and higher until exploding out onto the next track
Spine with some really manically calculated drumming.
The only thing hurting this album is the same thing that hurt
Old Pride, a sense that the songs bleed into each other. Regardless,
Pianos have created eight songs that effectively destroy the eight given to us two years ago.
