Reviews

After The Weather

After the Weather EP

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Review Date: 2008-03-17

The first thing to mention is that when a band takes the time to individually label and do the artwork on their discs, you should know they’re passionate. And passion is beauty when it comes to music, and it’s pretty apparent from beginning to end in this case.

I don’t know how you feel about three piece Montreal-based bands, but when they sound like this I’d sell my soul for a full length album. After The Weather comes out running pretty god damned well with their unofficial, and debut EP (for now only available from the band during their live shows). And wow, if you think that you’re hearing Matthew Bellamy (a la Muse) or Thom Yorke (Radiohead clearly) well then you should probably join the rest of us because Matthew Hills does such an outrageous job on the vocals for the entire duration of this album you’re not really going to know what to do with yourself.

 “All my friends are aliens and all my reasons are my own”, simple and powerful, and the strumming patterns that he laps on over top really add to the dynamics of the song.  It continues in variations for the rest of the album, he pulls out all the stops on tracks like “Jyoti found herself in a terrible mess” and “Charles Manson was a Saint”. The other two members of this three piece; Rob Helsten on bass and Trevor Zaaverda on percussion do a very good job of rounding out the sound to near perfection, or at least near perfect harmony.

 My only quarrel with anything on the album is that the band sounds really restrained. Now this can be used to their advantage as most of the time I really felt in the next ten seconds everything would just drop off the charts into some prog-quasi-grunge cacophony, but seldom happens, the notable occurrence being the outro for the last song because the band seems to get off on teasing me with their held-back sound orgy that I know they validate with live performances.  The band rides a wave of “just about to crash” the whole duration and I found myself wishing for some over the top theatrics at one point but even with the whole album sticking to the same tonal patterns there’s nothing bad to be said about how they do it. 

I think I’m just a hopeless romantic to hear some jaw-dropping breakdowns because the band presents itself as one that is very capable of such feats but the sound they make totally works for them. Though to be fair on a couple of songs the guitar work does reach the levels that I hoped to hear with use of some serious effects and harmony as in on the last minute or so of “Montreal was gone”.  They’ve got a boatload of control over what they play, and tracks like “Charles Manson...” really makes me wish that Rob Helsten and his bass were a woman so I could do unmentionable things to them, though it’s probably better for everyone involved that it isn’t the way of things. Every single track has a signature Helsten lick that you’re not likely to forget anytime soon. If you get a chance to see these guys live, you should go do it without a second thought. Maybe with a little more time and financing they’ll force themselves into everybody’s’ aural space and make the name for them that they are absolutely entitled to.

Score: 8.4

- Kade Davies