Labels: self released
Review by: Stuart Bartlett
This Refraction’s first full length, 6 tracks of instrumental post rock. I’ve listened to it twice now, once with
headphones and once on my sound system. It made more sense the second time round for whatever reason. For
the most part the songs seem to be never ending, if they cut down the songs by a few minutes, these guys would
have had a really strong record. Whereas what they ended up with is some really interesting ideas, mashed
together with some really boring and frankly uninteresting ideas. For a first full length release though, it does
have promise, at certain points the light and shade of tracks such as Mortal are fantastic, as is the song. But for
example the opener, Light Fades starts off BIG and in your face, after a minute it turns into a more intricate
laid back affair, repeating the similar structure of Loud/Quite/Loud/Quite throughout. The track is 9 minutes
long, it could have been 5minutes and great, the length totally took away from the exciting parts of the song.
At about the 6 minute mark it’s as if they ran out of ideas. Maybe if the tracklist was in a different order it may
have worked better, I can’t quite put my finger on it. I would say it’s defiantly a work in progress. If you’re into
instrumental post rock, check this out and you may find that “something”, which was missing for me.