HinweiseGenre : Experimental Progressive Rock (Instrumental)
Country : USA
Year : 2008

Have you ever had a certain feeling about an album, it comes out of nowhere and attacks all of your senses and emotions and makes you get that small chill on your spine that allows you to remember the joy of discovering new music. With the Internet, blogs, chatrooms and all of that music is usually served up to you, you rarely find it by accident. I was lucky enough to have that happened to me a few days ago when I received the album “Station” from the band Russian Circles, an outfit I’d never heard of. When I cracked open the CD I was instantly impressed. No ridiculous logo or artwork, a simple photo of what looks like 40s army soldiers dressed up for a company photo. The layout was sparse, no photo of the band, it was as if they had forgone the fancy album artwork so you would instantly drawn to the CD itself.

I put this on and was instantly mad for it, Russian Circles does what few bands can do instantly, they attack your emotions as well as your intellect. This is complex stuff, time signatures wise, all of it is instrumental and yet is saturated with emotions that run from loss to joy to anger and redemption. The opening track “Campaign” sets the stage for this ride, using a fluid tempo and use of guitars and keyboards to create what seems like a sense of euphoria, as if the protagonist of this album was as happy as he/she had ever been and yet the quiet would be disrupted, you could feel it in the music. The next track “Harper Lewis” begins to move into the area of making the serene scene uncomfortable using a thumping, repeating bass that is being encircled by eccentric musical quirks before they heavier and more direct musical crescendo appears. You get swept up in this, this album is not for the “hot single” crowd, it’s for people who use music to grow and need to hear an album end to end. The songs here run at the minimum four minutes all the way nine plus and at no point are you urged to skip past anything, you are in your seat, transfixed, projecting memories from your life into this album, feeling that it is a soundtrack to things in your existence that you may have forgotten or chosen to forget.

Musically I have no comparison for it, that would be too easy but in ideology they are there with Neurosis, Tool, The Swans, Genghis Tron, Pelican, Jesu, Isis and bands that construct whole albums that need to be heard from first song to last and that allow you enough freedom to post your own emotional identity on what they do. As “Station” continues to ebb and flow through the title track, the song “Verse”, “Youngblood” and finally the resolution track “Xaii” the music grows more frenetic, in places heavier and often more desolate and introspective. There are a lot of albums due this year that I’m excited about so I won’t throw “Album Of The Year” out just yet. It is nice to have something in the running this early in the year though.