Plumbiferous Media

Vir­ginia post-rock band Gifts from Enola, founded in 2005, released their fifth album, the self-titled Gifts from Enola, ear­lier this month. With Gifts from Enola, the band has fur­ther devel­oped its rich instru­men­tal sound to cre­ate an ener­getic, tightly-packed album which, while suf­fer­ing from cer­tain less-than-exciting sec­tions, is gen­er­ally quite interesting.

Gifts from Enola does a very good job with the con­struc­tion each of its five tracks, as well as the ele­ments from which they’re con­structed. Cre­ative instru­men­tals, includ­ing excel­lent per­cus­sion, are mixed across a num­ber of both dis­crete and care­fully woven lay­ers to cre­ate the album’s com­plex sound. The band does a good job of vary­ing their approach, espe­cially between tracks. This is made even more ben­e­fi­cial to the over­all sound of the album through care­ful use of tran­si­tions, which allow for near-seamless travel between tracks.

Along with the band’s main instru­men­tal styles, the band includes cer­tain quite dif­fer­ent inter­ludes and ele­ments. These regret­tably include the ill-advised vocal inte­gra­tion of tracks like “Dime and Suture” - but also sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter cho­sen sec­tions, such as the excel­lent clos­ing sec­tion of “Lion­ized,” which uses a echo­ing ver­sion of 40s style music to lend a new atmos­phere to the track.

While Gifts from Enola is cer­tainly an inter­est­ing album, a num­ber of flaws pre­vent it from being excel­lent. Most impor­tant of these flaws is the vari­abil­ity in qual­ity along the album. Cer­tain sec­tions are excel­lent, dis­play­ing the per­fect mix of the band’s instru­men­tal con­tri­bu­tions. How­ever, it’s regret­tably com­mon for those excel­lent sec­tions to be fol­lowed by or even sur­rounded by much less inter­est­ing parts. While rep­e­ti­tion lead­ing up to a grand crescendo is quite com­mon as well as quite com­monly well done in post-rock, in a num­ber of places on Gifts from Enola it seems more like mediocre sec­tions are sim­ply being over-repeated to set the stage for the excel­lent sec­tions. This rep­e­ti­tion isn’t helped by very long tracks, which, while also a sta­ple of the genre, on Gifts from Enola seem to lose steam - not at the end, where they gen­er­ally exit with their great­est energy - but at var­i­ous places along the way.

Gifts from Enola is largely instru­men­tal, with a few notable (and mostly regret­table) excep­tions. As pre­vi­ously stated, one of these is “Dime and Suture“‘s under­ly­ing vocal por­tion, which is best described as “metal-styled.” How­ever, instead of pro­vid­ing the short digres­sion from the band’s nor­mal meth­ods that you might expect, this and other such sec­tions (which are admit­tedly gen­er­ally lower-key than that on “Dime and Suture”) dis­tract the lis­tener from the band’s instru­men­tal strenghts, redi­rect­ing the music in a way that does lit­tle to improve it.

Given Gifts from Enola’s flaws, it is not quite an excel­lent album. How­ever, thanks to a great deal of cre­ativ­ity on the part of Gifts from Enola, both in the con­struc­tion of the album and in the con­tri­bu­tions of each of the band’s mem­bers, it is cer­tainly an inter­est­ing one. Though Gifts from Enola suf­fers from a num­ber of weak sec­tions, those sec­tions which are suc­cess­ful are gen­er­ally quite suc­cess­ful, such that the album is, by the end, cer­tainly more good than bad.

This post is tagged 70-79, Gifts from Enola