Labels: Robotic Empire
Review by: David McLaughlin
Hello hype! Ghastly City Sleep is ex-City of Caterpillar, pretty much my favourite band ever, so it took me a couple of months to get over the devastating fact that, just like Malady, Ghastly City Sleep is a very, very different beast from CoC. Instead, much of nine-minute opener “Ice Creaks” reminds me of Efterklang with its soft percussion, heavy ambience and pretty boy-girl vocals. It’s fairly chilled out and relaxing stuff up until about six minutes into the song when it really kicks off, with the lovely Mia of Kayo Dot adding some haunting strings before everything goes all Godspeed You! Black Emperor and explodes. I’m fairly jaded over the whole post-rock thing but in this case it still manages to hit the spot. The rest of the EP is a bit different, sounding somewhere between Slowdive and Liars but with really LOUD bass lines that will make you adjust the settings on your sub woofer. There are some genuinely moving bits amongst all the shoe gazing and more than enough going on with the instrumentation to keep you interested after repeated listens. My only gripe is with the vocals, and I feel they’ll make or break this for most people. If you’re a fan of Sigur Ros, then you’ll probably find them quite subdued, but to me there’s just something grating when a man sings as high as on “Hushing Weight”. It’s not as bad as Mare (Hydrahead doom/Sigur Ros hybrid toss) but things definitely sound a lot easier on the ears when his voice is softer and more subtle in the mix.
The music is definitely interesting enough to make this worth picking up though, and I’ll be anxiously waiting to hear the follow-up. Even with its small flaws this debut release is still better than most releases in the genre.