Caspian: Tertia

Post-rock, aka: music for students to study to, grows trickier to dissect with each additional album in the genre.

You see, post-rock music is like a sponge cake. It's a simple enough recipe, made from a basic set of ingredients, you don't have to worry about anything fancy. Problem is, anyone with a small amount of experience should be able to make a decent enough sponge cake.

Thus, to truly shine amongst the sponge cake making community, you're going to have to pull off something extraordinary, which is inherently difficult due to the basic and strict nature of the recipe. If you can make a nice one, there's a thousand other people who've made something similarly impressive.

As such, it has been necessary to re-draw the lines for post-rock albums. After all, a band, four or five chords and a second guitarist laying down an echoing tremolo section is enough to bring together an impressive sounding album in the genre nowadays. While the genre is far-from-dead, we'd consider it on the critical list, needing an inspiration injection before it becomes comatose from repetitive strain injury.

Onto Caspian then, Tertia is a decent enough album, the drums are cascadey, guitar one is chordey, guitar two is shimmery and the vocalist is dead, there's probably some bass in there too. Yet they fail to offer one single memorable moment throughout their entire second album.

A few years ago, this would have qualified for an easy 8-out-of-10, but if an average example for the genre becomes an eight, then an eight must become a five.

For you see, the overly-long 58 minutes of Tertia's run is glutted with predicable crescendos, passable arpeggios and pretty, yet unremarkable chord progressions.

"Concrescence" does break the mould a smidgen with a genuinely affecting lead guitar riff which marshals a gradual build-up without resorting to the familiar flurry of frenetic guitar slashings.

At it stands, it's hard to shake the feeling that mainstream post-rock has become the new residence for jam bands. That songs are born from one member playing four chords for seven or eight minutes while the other members of the band play something which sounds nice alongside it at varying tempos.

Until more structure, narrative (yes, instrumental music can have this) and experimentation is brought into their fray, Caspian will always be a band serving up epic, beautiful music alongside the other thousand or so bands also serving up the same epic, beautiful music.

So considering the re-drawn battles lines, we feel hurt to, yet compelled to issue the Massachusetts quintet a mark befitting their position in the post-rock genre.

You can download two albums' worth of genre-bending underground post-rock by checking out of compilation albums linked below. DRM-free and free-of-charge.

Strange Glue and the Post-Rock Underground: Vol. 1
Strange Glue and the Post-Rock Underground: Vol. 2