Mabou, Our Last Sleep is Our Final Awakening

Mabou plays instrumental rock heavily in the My Bloody Valentine vein. They experiment with various kinds of distortion and noise. Their record, Our Last Sleep is Our Final Awakening, is almost entirely instrumental. They play trance-inducing grooves, with drum beats that are very precise and groovy in a heavy rock kind of way. The music ranges from simple repeated riffs to actual songs, with lots of noise on top of everything.

The problem is that the noise, which is what they’re most interested in here, starts to sound the same after a while. If there’s enough to the song, then you don’t mind, and the combination works. But the melodic parts of most of the songs aren’t very interesting either — they’re not even melodic, they’re just riffs. If there were melodies for the riffs to contrast with (either vocal or instrumental), that would be one thing, but it’s just a bunch of riffs by themselves, and they get old.

The one decent song here is called “You’re Like Lights in December”; it doesn’t have much melody, but it does have dynamics and more variety than the other songs here. The keyboard parts here are pretty, particularly when the volume drops down. And when they get to the big guitar riff (which is big and snarling and really cool), they don’t go on for too long at that level — they bring the noise up in the background, which keeps things moving. And the bells at the beginning and end add nicely to the song. The song keeps changing, and that’s what makes it work so well. If the rest of the songs here were as dynamic, the album might be better, but they’re not.

Unfortunately, one song isn’t enough to make an album. Or even an EP. What do you do when there’s one song on a record that you might like? I guess that’s what iTunes is for.