ALBUM REVIEW: I Leave You This – Overhead, The Albatross
At its best, post-rock is not a recipe kit of instrumental rock tropes, but a broad canvas of ideas through which the extremes of emotion and catharsis can be experienced and processed. Eight years after their debut album, OVERHEAD, THE ALBATROSS have crafted a daring, wrenching record that lives up to those ideals with I Leave You This. At their recent sold-out London show, the Dublin quartet shared their motivation to complete this record at the urging of their friend Paul Lynch, who sadly passed away. It was certainly worth the wait.
First and foremost, this an album about grief – of death, loss, mourning, defiance, and a celebration of life. Lead single Your Last Breath opens with a rolling guitar line, setting a tense atmosphere amidst other distorted sound effects. The opening minutes are a blur of push-pull dynamics, with a dense layering of instrumentation – including stabs of savage saxophone that sear across the soundstage. It’s inventive, unpredictable, possessed of a relentless inertia. Its final third begins with piano and poetry: a devastating monologue of mortality and farewell, escalating into post-hardcore shouting amid a thundering crescendo. It defies technical explanation, leaving the listener with a lump in the throat.
The calmer Welcome Home provides respite after that draining opening. The ethereality and electronic voice textures evoke PORTER ROBINSON at his most serious. Vocals are used sparingly throughout the album in spoken-word settings, samples, or (as here) with extensive vocoded modulation and auto-tune, intended as an instrument itself. L’Appel du Vide showcases a rhythmic staccato aggression, contrasted against the soothing legato of strings and violining guitars. The song title translates as “The Call Of The Void” – the track alternating between soft and loud sections, said void reaching out via that insistent polyrhythmic beat, either in pounding toms, cutting synth lines or djent-adjacent guitar stabs.
Even within the confines of (mostly) instrumental music, OVERHEAD, THE ALBATROSS establish narrative purpose in their songs. The term Hibakusha refers to the surviving victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The centrepiece of that song is an anticipatory build into a crashing wall of sound, symbolic of that moment of terrifying destruction. Around it are driving, droning vocals over a pedal-note riff of panic, and rare beauty in a coda with a Japanese language voiceover. Elsewhere, At Sea strikes up similar titular evocations in its swaying intro. That track unmoors into sadness and grief once more, keyboardist David Prendergast‘s repeated refrain of “Begging the pain to stay” scarred across the track. Its latter sections break into a rave-style feel in the synths and drums before another vast outro, the painful minor chord change tugging at the heart each time.
That experimental palette raises I Leave You This above its peers, celebrating both electronic dance music and world music influences. The percussively diverse Miss Na Kita is a great example, its bongos and sweeping vocal sample evolving into crunching break beats. The two themes again come together on the euphoric second single This Is Like Love. Across six minutes, it successfully fuses the sweeping grandeur of post-rock and dancefloor club banger, foregrounding a Bollywood-style sampled vocal, later torn up into pieces and reassembled. A fusion of dance and post-rock is not new (see: 65DAYSOFSTATIC‘s We Were Exploding Anyway). Still, its execution here feels personal and intimate, unlike the more typical diffuse existential dread.
The album’s culmination is Paul Lynch, named in honour of the band’s late friend, and a full-throated expression of the processing of grief. It builds in all the sounds and ideas that have come before, beginning darker and sadder with a cold, detuned synth and that signature dense instrumentation. The synths warm as the song progresses, sadness transforming into a cathartic celebration of life. The track deploys choice vocal elements throughout – sad spoken-word samples (“It’s time to say goodbye”), further poetry over soaring strings (“We’ve reached the end my brother, goodbye is all we know”), and in its concluding moments a looping, glorious gang vocal chant and choir (“Farewell to you, we’ll meet again”).
From a musical and technical perspective, this is a highly accomplished record. So many elements and textures weave throughout the songs, drawing on various influences without feeling overindulgent. Rhythmically, it’s fascinating – equally adept at inspiring a dance party or thrilling headbanging. But the emotional core is where I Leave You This shines brightest: an inspiring and ultimately uplifting meditation on loss and what comes after. It’s a rare feat to have these aspects so thrillingly combined. OVERHEAD, THE ALBATROSS have created a record guaranteed to stick in the memory long after the final track plays out.
Rating: 10/10
I Leave You This is out now via Nice Weather For Airstrikes.
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