A Mother To Scare Away The Darkness - Halocraft (2021)

I have a tendency nitpick, for no particular reason, on the subgenre of post rock bands that are often quite good, but pretty conventional as rock bands. They get labelled as post rock mostly because it’s instrumental. I don’t think being a rock band who doesn’t hire a singer necessarily makes you a post rock band, maybe because my earliest experiences with the genre were the jazz- and electronic-inflected Tortoise, the un-label-able Fridge, and the post-apocalyptic madness of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

But the truth is this conventional but still sort of post- approach has yielded a ton of good music: Mono, Explosions In The Sky, Do Make Say Think, etc. And I’m never willing to die defending a bunker position that’s about genre rules.

One thing I found genuinely unexpected about Halocraft was the upbeat, major key poppiness. A lot of these expansive, cinematic bands like the ones I’ve mentioned go cold and dark as often as they can, sending us to icy realms lost in outer space somewhere.

Halocraft takes a very different view. There’s a melodic undercurrent and a tendency to stay sunny that gets more pronounced the more it builds.

It’s a remarkable album for lots of reasons. Come for the major key jams, stay for the complex layering and wide variety of sounds.