Album Review: postcards from new zealand - city islands
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
City Islands is album number twenty-two from the mysterious cohort known as postcards from new zealand – all lower case – which is no small feat for a band formed in 2008 and one which specialises in mind-bending instrumentation in their pursuit of the most dynamic soundscapes possible.
This is very much a record of sharp contrasts. One moment it is building grandiose musical monoliths, through the use of dualling synths and distorted guitars, creating a transcendental, otherworldly atmosphere. The next those same keys and strings are drawing out harsh, unforgiving drones, hypnotically spewing the blackest synth since Burzum’s incarceration albums or Blut Aus Nord at their most sociopathic.
While As the Towers Crumbled and Snow and Sand can be heard as mirror images of the other – the former being huge in scope and widescreen in execution, while the latter is unrelentingly abrasive, Tortuous Unwinding begins as a kind of harsh, polyphonic experimental jazz jam, before giving way to brief moments of clarity and repetitively unpredictable – acknowledging the oxymoron here - rhythms.
The underpinning sound of flowing water in Tortuous Unwinding leads into the album’s longest track, Ocean Avenue. After the uncertainty of the previous piece, this sixteen-minute-plus epic opens with a relatively calm sensation of floating, weightless in a warm sea – there’s even the faint sound of whale song off in the distance. But, be warned, for postcards from new zealand have demonstrated themselves to not be in any kind of forgiving mood and a heavy guitar chug is introduced to mess up your day.
Ocean Avenue moves through a number of sections, each taking the listener on a deeper dive into the electronically produced epics, becoming a reflection of the album as a whole as each disparate piece finds itself somewhere to settle to form a complete entity.
Concluding with the marching rhythms – and haunting, uneasy calm - of It Just Kept Coming, City Islands brings itself to a close and you suddenly realise you’ve been on an immense journey of discovery. Whether that journey has been out to the furthest reaches of the cosmos or into the quantum levels of existence is up to each traveller.
With City Islands, postcards from new zealand have drawn an incomplete map of the depths of experience and it is up to you, intrepid listener, to plot you own route through and to see what you may find hiding amongst the twists and turns.
