It's pretty easy to get excited about the amount and quality of instrumental rock in Australia right now. True you can't see it every weekend, but there's enough to feed the habit and some months just serve it up big. Right now Melbourne is in the middle of four weeks in which I get to see 15 different experimental, progressive instrumental bands. I don't even care that I missed Mono.
About a month ago I discovered another Melbourne band that makes songs without words when they were supporting Solkyri, and the breadth of styles and emotions they were creating was astounding. The Nest Itself create sublime moodiness and jarring tension along with moments of inward happiness and outward explosions of anything from joy to anger. Their debut album (in) constant search showcases nine tracks that blend post-rock and neo-classical through a progression that breathes with life and culminates in an uneasy stalemate.
There's a simple rolling phrase or motif that appears in most of the tracks, although its form varies and serves different purposes, but it ties the whole album together into one coherent piece. Other melodies are also kept simple and you never get a feeling that instruments and lines are competing, instead they take turns in supporting each other or simply dance around like butterflies in a field.
Opener 'on rare occasions' is a delicate piece of crescendo post-rock that builds with synth laying out a slow fuzzy chord progression, soon successively joined by cymbal, guitar and drums. Twin guitar slides its way in with melodies that weave around each other, picking up piano and bass along the way and before you know it the layered sound has lifted you into the air. Although far from ambient, there's no huge climax and no aggression at all, just a gentle caress.
The use of three kinds of keys together - piano, melotron (or similar) and synth - is not something you find too often and it works, as the next track 'the chill and the dank hollow' testifies, taking you through rich melancholy to deep despair that pulls with intense gravity and finally a violent, haunting end. It's amazing that something so unrushed can fit so much into a song of this length. Running into the next track piano becomes more prominent and the melody is just perfect.
The variety continues through the sparse neo-classical 'unfix' with just piano and field recordings, to slow-picked tremolo guitar over layers of noise in the next four tracks, but each is distinctive in instrumentation and the story they tell.
The wonderful ride on waves of emotion continues until the last track; '5, 4...', which has me torn between admiration and annoyance as it sets up the tension of listening to someone sing all but the last word of a song line. Taking a similar phrase to one in 'here lies the deepest of dens' but not progressing the song where it wants to go, the record would have been fine without it and instead feels unresolved. But in a way it's the difference between George Clooney's Ocean's 11 and Frank Sinatra's and for that reason it it's brilliant.
It's impossible to overstate how palpable the constant flow of emotion is. Instrumentation is diverse and inventive but it follows the music rather than setting the music so, for example, you don't hear guitar just because it's a rock band, you hear it when you need to. And when you do it's all the stronger and with far more impact. Either someone in the band has a background in classical music or they simply have a brilliant ear and mind for orchestration all resulting in a highly impressive debut.
