Souvaris - I Felt Nothing At All

by Dominic B. Simpson

published: 17 / 1 / 2005

Label: Bearos
Format: CD

Difficult, but highly rewarding debut album from Nottingham 6 piece instrumental post rock group, Souvaris

Review

You know you’re dealing with a post-rock album when a 75 minute long instrumental CD is made up of just four tracks, with titles like 'Nothing of How to Live, Only to Get and Get And Get; {Failed Love Song)' and, hilariously, 'A Summer Spent Observing Green Leaves'. The accompanying booklet, too, has an inexplicable 6-page long black-and-white cartoon ostensibly involving blokes going to the countryside and being amazed by a large bird. And finally, there’s that existential, enigmatic album title, one that’s crying out for an explanation. Souvaris would probably detest being roped into the hundreds of other bands also lazily tagged ‘post-rock’, but the fact that this 6-piece Nottingham-based band have played with the likes of Explosions In the Sky and Le Fly Pan Am suggests that they are certainly of that bent. And there’s no getting around the fact that parts of this album recall titans of that scene such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai. Indeed, the opening bars of the album certainly recall the opening bars of GY!BE’s 'Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven', with it’s quiet echoing guitar figure slowly rising in volume before being joined by drums, piano, violin, harpsichord and other instruments, swelling into an eventual cacophony that revisits the quiet-loud dynamics that many of these bands share. There’s also the same use of stringed instruments and infinite-delayed skyscraping guitar sounds, but luckily for Souvaris, they pull it off in beautiful fashion, and the remaining 75 minutes remain a spellbinding exploration of hypnotic textures and varied explanatory musical poles which straddle everything from a metronomic drums and one-chord guitar drone in the middle of the album to more ambient passages elsewhere. The result is that they manage to last the album’s length where many other albums of this genre (such as Mogwai’s ‘Come On Die Young’) simply become repetitive and dull. Despite the above comparisons, though, the album’s closest affinity could well be with the underrated later albums of Talk Talk, such as 'Laughing Stock' and 'Spirit of Eden', with it’s wash of spacious textures over the track’s 75 minutes, bringing in an organic mixture of instruments that eventually dissipates at the album’s end with a droning one-chord organ. Other references such as Bark Psychosis, Hood, even Nico’s ‘The Marble Index’, with it’s use of droning Eastern European instrumentation, back up the press releases’ claim that “you don't so much listen to their music as feel it”. Well worth checking out, though difficult to take all in one listen, this is one for those more reflective moments as the leaves turn brown in autumn.

Track Listing:-

1 I Be He That Lives To Telephonic Only!
2 Art As Survival / Survival As Art
3 A Summer Spent Observing Green Leaves
4 Nothing Of How To Live, Only To Get And Get And Get; (Failed Love Song)