Hertzsprung Gap - Peninsulas You Thought Were Islands

  by Andrew Carver

published: 17 / 12 / 2001

Label: Mantinka Conspiracy
Format: CD

intro

'Peninsulas You Thought Were Islands' starts off with some thumping drums, slaps on a layer of guitar squall, takes an abrupt detour into quiet, binary guitar plucking and whispered vocals, then it’s

'Peninsulas You Thought Were Islands' starts off with some thumping drums, slaps on a layer of guitar squall, takes an abrupt detour into quiet, binary guitar plucking and whispered vocals, then it’s back to the noisemaking. For variety, there’s a second, raspy vocalist responsible for singing over the noisy bits. You get seven different formulations over 27 minutes of this recipe on Hertzsprung Gap’s debut full length; how tasty you find it depends on your appetite for Chicago post-rock. Listening to this, I thought of Slint and its descendants and imitators. On the plus side, the production is crisp, and the guitarwork precise. On the negative, neither of the vocalists are all that winning. The lyrics tend toward the cryptic, and were probably written with how the words sound more in mind (there’s a fair amount of alliteration going on “... you leave like a leaver leaves, lookalike lives ...”) than how much sense they made. This isn’t a boring album — I listened to it several times without it wearing out its welcome; heck, I even wiggled my feet in time while it was playing — but it does seem a trifle generic. The one thing that really distinguishes the album from the post-rock pack is the strong geographical streak in the songs (for example, “Texas Hotel Parking Lot,” “The Island of Alaska”). Incidentally, the Hertzsprung Gap the band is named after is an astonomical feature named after Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung, who noted that there were no bright stars of intermediate colour. Knowing this did not increase my appreciation of the band’s music.

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