East India Youth

Released just a year after East India Youth's distinctive indie electronic debut, the Mercury Prize-nominated Total Strife Forever, Culture of Volume presents another blend of Eno-inspired synth compositions and thoughtful electropop songs. However, where the former was mostly instrumentals with a few songs, Culture of Volume offers the reverse for a poppier and more melodic, but equally hypnotic and well-crafted sophomore LP. While East India Youth had been essentially a solitary project for multi-instrumentalist William Doyle, he brought in Graham Sutton to mix this time, George Hider recorded Doyle's vocals, and Hannah Peel provided acoustic strings. Their work polishes an adventurous landscape where, without changing the record's pensive tone, tempos, complexity, and pitch range shift regularly. This variability begins right from the contrasting opening two tracks. "The Juddering" serves as an instrumental takeoff, both as the album's opener and in the sense of sound; its slow-building, mechanical, turbine effect mingles pitches and noise until a simple melody coalesces. It's followed by the sparse song "End Result" ("The end result is not what was in mind"), melodic and vocal-led with welcoming, blunt bell tones. The record never settles into a full-on catchy, Pet Shop Boys-type affair, or settles in at all, though moments are remindful of '80s British dance-pop, such as the trance-infused "Beaming White" with a far-reaching, Erasure-like melody.

The recent release of Jeanette Leech’s book ‘Fearless: The Making Of Post-Rock’ (Jawbone Press) celebrates post-rock and its origins. Finding new inspiration, bands were beginning to experiment with techniques as the digital age took over. A case study in her new book, Bark Psychosis were one of the most innovative bands of their time and as legend has it, saw the first use of the term ‘post-rock’ by music critic Simon Reynolds. Following several singles and EPs, the avant-garde soundscapes built around drones and samples of 21-minute stand-out track ‘Scum’ arrived just two years before their seminal debut ‘Hex’ (1994). Frustrated by the mainstream, ‘Scum’ was a huge statement that set them apart from the beginning.