Balmorhea: Rivers Arms

Put the words 'Texan' and 'Instrumental' together, and you create flashes of towering melodies, earth-shaking drums and songs twice the length of a Greer Garson acceptance speech.

Balmorhea, however, stand completely independent from their post-rock state-mates such as Explosions In The Sky and This Will Destroy You. Not a single drum is hit during the entire experience and the focus is intensely placed on concocting sensitive and illuminating mood pieces which are more concerned with developing a singular theme as opposed to wowing with dynamic shifts and gargantuan walls of noise.

A brief glance down the track list and it becomes apparent that Balmorhea place a composition emphasis on times and places Their band name itself is a shout out to the minutely populated Texan city. Elsewhere, there're odes to 'San Solomon', the artesian spring which neighbours their namesake, 'The Limmat', a picturesque Swiss river, Californian coastline of immense beauty 'Windansea Beach' and San Francisco's 'Divisadero Street'. The duo of Rob Lowe and Michael Muller seek to instil within us, the very emotions and splendour which draw their hearts to these locations. They do this, not with technical proficiency or structural trickery, but by simple melodic layering complete with the occasional graceful and eloquent segues.

Each composition is a colouring book version of a 'Group of Seven' masterpiece. They supply the scope, the moods, the themes and the spectacle, and yet the listener is required to make the investment of their time and imagination in order to flesh out the sound into something with greater resonance.

"San Solomon" begins the album by conjuring up the kind of score you'd envision in the tenuous peace before a nuclear weapon drops. With the sound of jubilant children ever-present, banjo, vocalisations, violins and piano highlight the serenity before the storm. In the two part seasonal themed episode, "The Summer" pits guitar versus guitar as delicate picking and touch harmonics emulate the nervous light flickering through the leaves. It's counterpoint, "The Winter" meanwhile, houses the albums first dramatic shift in dynamics before it's curtailing. All this is a precursor to the emotive centrepiece of "Barefoot Pilgrims". As the violent smashing of ivory gives way to furious picking of the guitar it creates not only an impactive seismic shift, but also spotlights the closest this neoclassical duo get to the elegant brutality of post-rock.

Upon the reprise of "San Solomon", the airy vocalisations make their return and add the beauty and wonder of humanity to that - already well explored beauty - of nature. Should anyone ever want to create a calendar of breathtaking vistas for the blind. We think you may well of already been beaten to the chase.