Plumbiferous Media

Caspian, a post-rock band hail­ing from Mass­a­chu­setts, released its sec­ond album ear­lier this week. On Ter­tia, Caspian shows the expe­ri­ence lent to them by its pre­vi­ous release, but at the same time they refuse to always use their clearly present abil­ity to pro­duce pro­found post-rock. Ter­tia is a jun­gle filled with both good and bad, but few real treasures.

Ter­tia begins well with the expertly-composed “Mie,” open­ing smoothly with a sur­pris­ingly lively sta­tic and grow­ing beau­ti­fully into an all-encompassing sound under­laid by the radio-like buzz of muted vocals, all the while tran­si­tion­ing into a light, piano and synth-filled sec­ond act. The begin­ning of Ter­tia is Caspian at its best, and it’s a pity that the rest of the album can’t match up to that standard.

As Ter­tia pro­gresses, it clearly suf­fers from a lack of inno­va­tion, but Caspian has nev­er­the­less done many things right. They’ve built intrigu­ing intros for much of the album, from the rock gui­tar of “Mala­coda” to the quiv­er­ing hum which begins “The Raven,” and the entirety of Ter­tia is infused with the sheer power which Caspian made their trade­mark on The Four Trees. Heavy gui­tar lay­er­ing and abrupt shifts in vol­ume occa­sion­ally give the album a metal­lic ambi­ence, which plays the dual role of dis­rupt­ing con­sis­tency in the album and spon­ta­neously ener­giz­ing the music. Shifts between the softer sound of tracks like “Ghosts of the Gar­den City,” which uses a light vocal layer in much the same was as “Mie” though in a slightly less suc­cess­ful man­ner, and stronger tracks such as “Of Foam and Wave” pre­vent the album from becom­ing too repet­i­tive, though it can’t quite escape that fate on indi­vid­ual tracks.

As suc­cess­ful as some tracks are, Ter­tia never fully escapes from rep­e­ti­tion, awk­ward tran­si­tions, and tracks that com­pletely fail to influ­ence the album as a whole, except to increase its total length. One of the worst offend­ers, “La Cerva” repeats the same minia­ture theme through nearly the entire track while try­ing to make it sound inter­est­ing by tweak­ing an ele­ment here or there, adding or remov­ing a voice, or chang­ing the key.

Though Caspian has clearly cemented cer­tain ele­ments, it has not yet man­aged to find the line between drawn out and overly lengthy. The glock­en­spiel line and the syn­the­sized choir sound of “Ghosts of the Gar­den City” are per­fect exam­ples of the lat­ter cat­e­gory. So while “Mala­coda” (even with its awk­ward tran­si­tions) and “Con­cres­cence” push the album for­ward, other tracks like “Epochs in Dmaj” and “Vienna” hold the album par­a­lyzed. With Ter­tia, Caspian has done the extra­or­di­nary: mak­ing post-rock tracks sound long - even when under five minutes.

While Ter­tia begins well with the for­mi­da­ble “Mie,” the energy of that track quickly goes to waste, squan­dered through “La Cerva“‘s inces­sant rep­e­ti­tion, and Ter­tia never attains that level of qual­ity again. Sev­eral tracks, such as “Mala­coda” and “The Raven” are cer­tainly inter­est­ing but together lack the diver­sity needed to make them truly excep­tional. By the end, Ter­tia has formed less into a solid album and more into a jum­ble of tracks, some mediocre, some mid­dling but intrigu­ing, and very few inspired. Buried under so many pedes­trian efforts, the lat­ter two groups can­not hope to tri­umph over the short­com­ings of the rest. And so Ter­tia is mediocre, though it cer­tainly had the poten­tial to be much more.

This post is tagged 40-49, Caspian