Bed
Spacebox

I discovered this French band on an old forum where they suggested post rock albums, and my brain - obviously - stores names upon names, and then at some point decides it's time to have and listen.

Listening, in reality, is not that simple. I mean really listening. Listening not just to fill your ears.
After the first listen, it was easy, too easy, to label this as a somewhat boring album. But fortunately, I insisted, and now I find myself wanting to write about it. It's up to you whether this is a good or a bad thing.

I reread the album's title, Spacebox, and as usual, titles don't make sense until you find it. That word - Space - made me understand how I should listen. Look for spaces and not notes, pauses and not sounds.
That's how I find myself comparing it to a little masterpiece like Hex by the never enough acclaimed Bark Psychosis, to help me define this album. A record with intentions similar to those of the London band, which values silences, sings in whispers, but conversely, has drums always played with brushes (which greatly characterize the overall sound), the double bass and almost entirely acoustic sounds.

Capable of hypnotic and lulling vortices, highly expansive atmospheres without ever slipping into conceptual ambient, the band achieves the modest feat of creating an album that's fragile yet solid at the same time, where a simple double bass line is enough to define a piece (Wondertalk), or a couple of harmonics in a loop (Plainfield).
Certain pieces are more nocturnal like Nightsweeping, others are slightly brighter, like the single Polder One (with colors borrowed from Belle & Sebastian), or yet the guitar interplay of The Silent Bees with an agreeable undergrowth of synth.
But it's at the end that this project gives its best. The over 8 minutes of The Wood Bunch are a stunning and interminable stasis. A simple pattern on the cymbals serves as a backdrop for some laid chords, and in no time creates a dense and palpable, sweet and unsettling atmosphere; up until the final mantra repeated so much as to become a hallucination.
so much as to become a hallucination.
so much as to become a hallucination.