ALBUM REVIEW: All Things Shining – Oh Hiroshima
Post-rock is a difficult genre to get stand out in; it’s a rarity where the vast majority of bands are, at worst, dependable to good. It takes a truly exceptional band, then, to go above and beyond. Enter OH HIROSHIMA, who are naturally from Sweden. Since 2007, they’ve been a duo, a quartet and are now back down to a duo, this time comprising founding member Jakob Hemström and his younger brother, Oskar Nilsson. Their fifth album, All Things Shining, represents both a paring back in band numbers but also a big expansion in their sound to encompass all-new sonic worlds.
At its heart, All Things Shining is designed to prompt questions of identity, particularly over time, something that OH HIROSHIMA themselves have wrestled with before boiling down to a sibling duo. They use that dynamic and trust to explore questions of meaning, as well as challenge jaded and disenchanted youth, asking us to once again feel wonder and awe. Setting the scene is Wild Iris, some of their most urgent work to date as despite its initial mid-pacing, it turns the opening line “My friends are ordinary” inside out as it warns against accepting mediocrity.
Holiness Movement embraces indie rock and post-punk at its outset, pulsating horns and morose vocal melodies gradually expanding the song further. It’s an audacious opening, showing two fairly different sides of the band, but after all, they’re no strangers to diversity, while Swans In A Field juxtaposes swirling guitar with grand orchestra and saxophones. That desire, demand even, that people experience wonder and awe? It’s baked into these songs, from slower openings or quiet passages to thundering crescendos. Elsewhere, final single Deluge balances dark and light both thematically and musically, at times crashing down like its name and at others dancing like raindrops on the pavement.
The duo examine the naïve radicalism of youth in Secret Youth, comparing it against the more calculated, sometimes conservative nature of adulthood through krautrock-influenced and more traditional song structures, identifiable choruses and repeating patterns echoing the cyclical nature of life. With its finale Memorabilia, All Things Shining is brought to a drawn-out but no less memorable conclusion. Slow-burning at its outset, Memorabilia makes full use of its seven-minute runtime to deliver an arresting final meditation on the fleeting and fickle nature of wonder in the modern world and whether there’s still place for it.
With the loss of half the band, and indeed one of its founding members, All Things Shining was in some ways a make-or-break moment for OH HIROSHIMA. The great news is that, without fail, they’ve risen to that challenge. Packed with new and exciting twists on their core sound, the two-piece make some of the fullest-sounding music they’ve ever done, embracing orchestras, neo-classical, indie, krautrock and more throughout. In wrestling directly with questions around purpose, growth and meaning that could well have been asked over the past few years, OH HIROSHIMA have delivered their most essential work to date.
Rating: 8/10
All Things Shining is set for release on June 28th via Pelagic Records.
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