Gifts from Enola - Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind
Rating
RIYL
Explosions in the SkyCaspian
Russian Circles
Pelican
If These Trees Could Talk
Tracklist
1 Behind Curtains Closing2 Early Morning Ambulance
3 City Lights Scraped The Sky
4 In The Company Of Others
5 With The Tides In Hindsight
6 Miles Of White
7 We Watched Them Lose Our Minds
8 Screaming At Anything That Moved
9 Memoranda
Users Rating |
Your RatingCreate an account or log in to rate this album |
Recent Ratings |
|
|
|
On August 6, 1945 the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, gave Hiroshima, Japan a gift in the form of an atomic bomb. Similarly, in September of 2006 the Virginia quartet Gifts From Enola unleashed their own musical version of an atomic bomb on the world with their album Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind, which relentlessly pummels the listener with a nuclear assault of face-melting instrumental rock. What is most impressive about Gifts From Enola is the level of maturity and skill they have displayed on Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind, despite being comprised of members who were only 19/20 years old during the recording of the album.
Despite the fact that the editor-in-chief of Stylus Magazine dim-wittedly called Gifts From Enola, along with other small-time instrumental acts, rank amateurs of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and told them to hand in their violins (they don’t even use a violin throughout the entire album) to Efrim (the head of GY!BE), Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind is an incredibly refreshing album that bears absolutely no resemblance to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind is a metal inspired instrumental album that is much heavier than your typical post-rock and generally conveys a loud-even louder dynamic along the lines other post-metal acts like Russian Circles and Pelican. However, unlike those two, Gifts From Enola doesn’t really incorporate much doom or sludge into their music. Instead, they sound more like Explosions in the Sky if the volume was put up to 11.
Similar to EITS’s Those Who Tell the Truth, Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind starts off with ambient guitar noodling on “Behind Curtains Closing” before we are quickly awakened with an onslaught of pummeling riffage. These guitars continue to reign throughout the opening track, especially midway through where the tempo changes gears and the guitars are off to the races. The tension created by the guitars subsides towards the end and an ambient passage leads us directly into the second track, “Early Morning Ambulance”, which relies heavily on ambiance and shows us early in the record that Gifts From Enola are more than just about heavy guitars. With that being said, the third track “City Lights Scraped the Sky” starts off, oh how do the kids these days put it, oh yeah “LOUD AS FUCK”. “City Lights Scraped the Sky” is an absolute monster that destroys everything in its path. The track does slow down, though, into melodic dueling guitars, but slowly re-emerges into a heavy riff-fest that repeats the face-melting process.
The next four tracks display a very different side of Gifts From Enola. Rather than each track being elephantine instrumentals, each is a short song that incorporates everything from jazzy bass lines, to electronics, and ambiance along with their trademark guitar rock. What’s so remarkable about these four songs is that though they sound perfectly fine on their own, they sound so much better when you play all four of them one after the other. The songs flow so well into one another that they sound more like one 16 minute song rather than four 4 minute ones. “With the Tides in Hindsight”, the second track in these four, displays mastery of ambient electronics like no other heavy post-rock or post-metal band has done before and sounds more like something Hammock would do.
The eighth track “Screaming at anything that Moved” brings us back to the monstrous instrumentals, which is a good thing because this track is arguably the strongest on the album. “Screaming at anything that Moved” incorporates all of Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind into one 8 minute song and is a fitting way to close out the album. The last track “Memoranda” is truly the icing on the cake. Starting off with a slow minimalist piano tune before erupting into a joyous wall of guitars and symbols, “Memoranda” is the most emotionally riveting song on Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind and has you attached to the album and wanting more.
Luckily for us, more is what we shall get, because Gifts From Enola is planning on releasing another album by the end of this year. However, until then, Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind will be on heavy rotation in my stereo and deservedly so. With Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind, Gifts From Enola has provided us with not only just an album, but a gift.
--Armand Babian
Comments
Tucson, AZ
Colorado Springs, CO
AZ
www.myspace.com/arcoftheaurora
PA
Music Blog.
Depths blog. (my band)
Los Angeles
postrockpaperscissors
Colorado
Los Angeles
postrockpaperscissors
It's blowin' cool outside today...
Waterloo, Ontario
Top Ten of 2009 http://www.decoymusic.com/users/3747/top_tens/2009
NY/PA
Los Angeles
postrockpaperscissors
Minnesota
Find me EVERYWHERE:
