DecoyMusic.com

Heralded by Nick Senior as a "gateway drug to the post-rock genre," Akron, Ohio's If These Trees Could Talk lead us into the Red Forest today. An awesome and awe-inspiring follow up to 2009's wildly successful Above the Earth, Below the Sky, sophomore album Red Forest finds the band "somewhere between the delay and reverb-driven songwriting of post-rock and the strikingly crushing sludge of post-metal," like taking Irepress with a fistful of sleeping pills. The quintessential cascading waves of tremolo that mark post-rock are underscored by sweeping currents of white-capped bass. Wisps of ephemeral atmosphere are in turn crushed by knuckle-dragging, ball-dropping crescendos with grit and bite. There's post-rock, and then there's If These Trees Could Talk.