Our Brother The Native - Make Amends for We are Merely Vessels

  by Jamie Rowland

published: 19 / 3 / 2008

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Review

The title should give you some clue as to the nature of this album; you’re talking long songs (the shortest being 6 minutes), difficult music (style varies between Sigur Ros, Isis and everything in between, often in the same song) and with titles like ‘As They Fell Beneath Us’, ‘Trees’ (parts 1 and 2) and, my personal favourite, ‘The Multitude Are Dispersing’. To put it another way, you’re going to have a real good time. To be fair to Our Brother the Native, if you’ve ever listened to their first album, Tooth & Claw, you’ll know anyway that they’re not the most digestible outfit going, and presumably if you’re thinking of buying this second effort you’re the kind of person with the patience to meet the demands of such musical experimentation. It is certainly an interesting listen, and there are some very fine compositions indeed (‘As They Fall Beneath Us’ is a great, building track), but any album that exceeds 10 minutes on half the tracks is, in my opinion, asking a lot of their listener. Overall though, 'Make Amends…' is worth the effort. The best way to take this album is probably to treat it like an article you have to read for an exam – take breaks every 15 minutes or so, have a cup of tea or go for a walk and clear your head, maybe pop something slightly more listenable into the hi-fi for a while, then come back to it from where you left off. But I mean only do that if you really want to hear the album. If you don’t like the band you’d just be stretching out an unpleasant experience for yourself. That would be stupid.

Track Listing:-

1 Rejoice
2 As They Fell Beneath Us
3 We Are The Living
4 Tree Part I
5 Tree Part II
6 Younger
7 Untitled
8 The Multitudes Are Dispersing

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