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PURCHASE
TAP RECORDS HERE!
This
we take with us - 2009
La
Luna de Negra - 2004 Fable
(reissue) - 2005 A
Burning Light - 2006
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UPCOMING
SHOWS:
ASKLANDAGANZA III
Vaudeville
Mews - DSM,IA 212 4th St 7PM $5
The third annual most beloved event in the history of
mankind... has come again. Come celebrate a huffman buttslam birthday,
indulge in the hundred person shot of tasty black velvet, the momentous
Man of the Year presentation, a shit ton of surprises and the terrifyingly
bodacious sounds of The Poison Control Center, The Autumn Project, It's
True, Derek Lambert, and Mr John Solarz spinning records throughout the
night! I'm shitting myself with excitement. I hope you are too. THEE
ASKLANDAGANZA III...It's here!
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Reviews of This we take with us:
If albums could be compared to books, then most records put out these days
would qualify as collections of short stories: that is, representing a
series of short works, which may be interrelated, but more often are not.
And don’t get me wrong: short stories are awesome. But, perhaps because
of my peculiar constitution which makes me automatically value longer or
larger things higher, I tend to prefer novels to short stories. And, in
the world of non-classical music, novels just aren’t in great supply, if
you know what I mean.
Which I why I am so happy to review This We Take with Us, the
latest album from Des Moines-based post-rock outfit The Autumn
Project. Beyond a doubt, these eight tracks are no short stories;
rather, they are fully-fledged chapters in a larger work, which comprises
the whole record. In an industry which often seems to spend so little
focus on the composition of the album as a complete work, The Autumn
Project blazes ahead with a shining example of what heights musical
interrelation can bring to post-rock.
This interrelation can be found in the details: although some keys and
slight electronic texturing can be found, mostly in the beginnings and
ends to the tracks, primacy is given to one guitar, one bass, and one set
of drums, which combine to form chord-driven post-rock, one far more
aggressive than would perhaps usually be associated with the genre. In
general, the guitar and bass maintain a consistent tone throughout This
We Take with Us, which, together with segueing the songs together,
helps to blend the album into a cohesive whole.
Which is not to say that the songs don’t stand on their own! This is
certainly not the case; individual rhythmic patterns and musical motifs
establish themselves in each track, giving each song its own personality.
But like a group of eight siblings, there is a very apparent similarity
(call it familial in nature) between the works, and it soon becomes
obvious that a knowledge of all is required to have a knowledge of any.
This family metaphor only goes so far; it is not only the individual
compositions of the songs which interrelate the pieces of this album, for
the structure and order of those tracks are also of the utmost importance.
From the driving solo drum beat of the first few seconds, through the
stunning ambiance of “5”, to the balls-out orgastic guitar walls
devolving into fields of static in the closing minutes, This We Take
with Us is marked by stunning dynamism. After the first three or so
tracks set things up, we are led into “4”, the longest song on the
album, and also potentially the most diverse. It begins slowly, with
simple arpeggios at a leisurely rate. Coming off of a lot of action in the
previous tracks, this serves as a welcome respite. Yet, we also wonder how
long The Autumn Project can keep this up. Through the next
eight-and-a-half minutes, an incredible tension is built, as repetitions
increase and the use of distortion elevates. Then, a single chord is
struck, allowed to sound for eight seconds - seeming rather like thirty -
and then all hell breaks loose. We are immersed a firestorm rivaling
anything yet experienced on the album, which burns brightly for the next
six minutes.
But all fires burn themselves out, and so does “4”, leading eventually
into the ambient interlude of “5". Now, normally bands of more
aggressive persuasion might use ambient music to give the listener a break
after a particularly active song, and so ambiance comes as no surprise
here. What is astonishing, however, is the depth to which the members of
The Autumn Project devote themselves to this ambiance. “5” could
perhaps be justifiably labeled as an interlude, but it is no filler track.
A full-fledged song which could be listened to on its own and thought
pretty damn good, it achieves levels of the fantastic in the larger
context of the album. It is a rare thing indeed for such proficient
post-rockers to be able to command such skill in the ambient realm; rarer
still is the band which can incorporate both styles seamlessly,
side-by-side on the same album, in such a manner that either would feel
incomplete without its counterpart. If you want true evidence of The
Autumn Project's skill in the composition of their album as a whole, I
suggest you need look no farther than “5”, for it plays such a pivotal
role that I would be tempted to call this ambient interlude the
cornerstone of the entire album.
If post-rock in the era after The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place
is often thought of primarily in terms of crescendos and decrescendos,
that is, building the music up to powerful heights before unleashing a
whirlwind of catharsis and the subsequent peace thereafter, then the
primary strength of This We Take with Us lies in applying that
crescendo-concept to the entire album. This goes far beyond having “loud
songs” and “soft songs,” although such distinctions can be made in
some places. Rather, extraordinary tension is built up over the course of
several songs, before finally being released. Thus the third track builds
on the second, which built upon the first, and all this will finally be
released in the breathless conclusion to “4”. In the second half, the
ashes are reassembled once more, towering even higher this time, before
finally exploding in the final minutes of “8”, eventually giving way
to faceless static. This We Take with Us is a truly post-rock
album, as few have been before, in that the micro- and macro-organizations
resemble, inform, and affect one another. To put it perhaps rather
bluntly, this is that seventy-four minute cohesive post-rock song you’ve
always dreamed about - or which I have, at any rate.
In any case, talk is cheap, and I’ve done quite a bit of that here. If
you perhaps have been skimming over this review, hoping to find my bottom
line, here it is: except perhaps, and only perhaps, for Gifts from
Enola’s From Fathoms, this is the best damn post-rock
I’ve heard all year. This We Take with Us is truly a novel of
an album. This is extraordinary music, and I would advise you quite
strongly to pay attention to it.
-Tom Butcher - The Silent Ballet .com
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Review from Minnesota's world famous RADIO K:
I keep reading review after review of this record, and there seems to be,
at the bare minimum, a one-word consensus on the aesthetic of the newest
release from Des Moines, Iowa’s The Autumn Project. Massive. From the
pounding and driving drum beat which first strikes the ear at the
beginning of the record, to the electronic static washouts bringing a
close, this 74-minute opus plays not as a collection of songs, but as one
cohesive unit. And the intensity never lets up, reaching its peak just
before the 9-minute mark on “Song 4,” a 14+ minute epic which brings
to mind one of The Evpatoria Report’s 15-minuters, washed out in
Mono’s “Lost Snow” static. Dark, brooding, thunderous and heavy,
this record does not “play nice.”
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Decoy Music 3.5 out of 4
I find that there is a weird phenomenon at play when it comes to home-made, self-recorded albums and the types of bands that make them. In my experience, for almost every genre of music, when I receive an album that is obviously self-record, self-produced, and sometimes even self-constructed (usually using the CD case as an excuse to make an art project), the music contained on that plastic disc is, to be blunt, often pretty bad. The bands sometimes possess a large amount of ambition and definitely have their heart in it, but sometimes the talent just isn’t there. So in most cases, when I get these types of releases I often cringe before listening… that is unless the album is from a post-rock band. I don’t know what it is about this specific genre, but almost every self-released post-rock album I receive, in comparison to efforts from other genres, contains music that is extremely polished, well thought out, and very professional in nature. It’s almost as if post-rock bands tend to care about the craft of making music more than bands of other genres. I know that may sound a bit elitist, but it’s hard to deny that post-rock bands, more often than not, have a more nuanced and informed knowledge of music than bands at the same level in other genres.
The Autumn Project’s album This We Take With Us is one of the aforementioned self-recorded, homemade affairs and, being that these guys are a post-rock band, I was unsurprisingly not disappointed by this album. Hailing from the state of Iowa, it seems as if The Autumn Project has incorporated the wide open spaces of the Iowan countryside into their musical approach. Playing a form of Constants meets Explosions in the Sky meets Gifts From Enola styled post-rock-metal, the band allows their compositions room to stretch out and grow to their fullest.
The first three tracks of the album (none of the eight songs on this album have titles) show the band rushing forth, playing with different ways to create crescendos and large walls of sound. There’s nothing necessarily unique about these tracks, but they are fine examples of what you’ve come to expect from bands playing around in the post-metal genre. The fourth track, however, is where the band seems to come into their own. The 14+ minute epic starts out methodically with a structure akin to some of Isis’ more contemplative songs. It slowly grows, weaving in more and more layers until a third of the way in it pulls back only to build a powerful and melancholic middle third followed up by an overflow of sound capped off with a final minute of aftershock effects.
With such a strong first half, it’s unfortunate that the band takes a slight misstep on the fifth track, an eight minute quasi-interlude. The completely ambient piece would have felt like a natural break in the album if it were only a minute or two in length, but it drags on way past its welcome. Fortunately this appears to be the only real mistake the band makes as the final three tracks build the band’s sound out even further. Track six again has a very strong Isis feel in how the song plays out, while the seventh track does what should have been done with the fifth track and turns a long, ambient build-up into a necessary prelude to a gorgeous post-rock crescendo leading into the final track. Having exhausted their post-metal playing at the beginning of the album, they cap off this effort with a 13 minute, luscious post-rock track that, while very familiar feeling, is a solid ending to this 73 minute trip.
As has been the case in the past, I am once again surprised by the quality put forth by an independent, unsigned post-rock band. It’s apparent that The Autumn Project have put a lot of time and effort into This We Take With Us, not only musically but in the release itself. If you are lucky enough to get your hands on the physical release, it’s a nice cardboard slipcase that is hand numbered and part of a limited run. It fits in well with the rest of my post-rock collection and will with that of any other post-rock fan. The Autumn Project have crafted a very solid post-rock-metal effort that will hopefully get noticed by connoisseurs of the genre.
--Rick Gebhardt
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From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website . avestin
Special Collaborator
Where have I heard this before? It sounds familiar; wide epic guitar riffs with a nice touch of keyboards to enhance the richness of sound, escalating swirling theme, reaching a peak. I've heard this in the works of Godspeed You Black Emperor! And Explosions In The Sky. But much like I love the works of Sparrows Sing and Swarm, who are what some may call clones (of Godspeed You Black Emperor that is), I find this work by The Autumn Project to be somewhat derivative (if not more in tracks 1 and 2), but very well executed and also pure joy to listen to. Listening to the first track on their album, This We Take With Us, I could have mistaken it for an Explosions In The Sky piece. This is the danger of this shores; walking in others steps (or closely following it). But as the album goes on, I got more and more absorbed into it and could discern more of their own personality in the music, more of their passion. There are some instances where I was thinking of Russian Circles, due to the powerful nature and aggressiveness of the music (track 6 for example). The musicianship is well accomplished, the music sounds great, the atmosphere and themes captivating; and if you could settle for that, it is fine. I could enjoy the album for what it is. So allow me to try and do justice to the album by stopping to compare it to previous bands, I think you get the picture.
There are 8 pieces on this album, flowing quite naturally from one on to the next. The music is powerful emotionally, moving and beautiful. There's not so much development of themes, more of creating one and thriving on it for a while, and then changing things a bit, by adding more components, alternating a bit the rhythm or other kinds of manipulations which all go well and eventually reaching an emotional peak. There is also aggressiveness in here; not the raw mindless sort, but a purely emotional type, where all instruments get as loud as they can and indulge in the moment (tracks 3 and 4 for instance). In this sense, this is a very powerful album, one that is best heard at high volume, and one that could energize one's spirit. There is such intensity in the music and all 3 musicians seem to invest their entirety into it, every ounce of energy they have. It's comes crushing down, pummeling the listener of his comfortable listening position. In this sense, they go beyond the intensity of other bands in this style and match up with the brutality of Russian Circles. Their sound is a little "dirty" if you can follow my meaning. And it sits very well with their sound and what they are out to create and the atmosphere they are after. Their music, as I mentioned above, is epic in a way, not only due to the length of the pieces here, but also due to their structure being grand, massive and the way it surrounds me as I listen it. That is what I want an album to do; drown me or absorb me into it. The Autumn succeeds in that, and so I can't speak badly of an album like that.
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