the islands & the sea

Producing a right bloody racket which can be heard all the way from Texas, USA is The Islands And The Sea, an instrumental trio who kick the living shit out of guitars, bass and drums to create devastating waves of noise and dense, sludgy soundscapes.

... a wondrous cacophony of noise that blasts out of the speakers with devastating ferocity. Immensely powerful, domineering and huge in sound and presence are six tracks, running for a combined time of almost 50 minutes, which will push you as far as you can be pushed by instrumental music, without making the noise and textured collages of sounds they produce too overpowering in such a way that they become unlistenable or overly confrontational. In fact on occasion, whilst not exactly softening their sound, the music they produce takes on a melodic quality, awash with captivatingly descriptive presence, but still nestled together with thunderous percussions, bass and guitar.

Now, whilst there may be a lot of bands that inhabit the instrumental post-rock/post-metal genre, not everyone is going to throw something original or fresh-sounding into the pot. It's all too easy for bands to just blur into one another, without making any real effort to stand out from the crowd. Yet this ability to offer up something slightly different from the norm is one of the strengths that I feel The Islands And The Sea deliver throughout their debut album. As opposed to going headfirst into a frenzy of noise, or making thickly claustrophobic cinematic-styled aural structures, this trio have extracted the important and precise elements from both of these styles, and amalgamated them with a sound and atmosphere that is very much theirs alone. This fluctuates from almost dark ambient soundscapes to massive walls of drones, to distorted feedback that isn't a million miles away from the sounds of harsh industrial noise to delicate yet ready-to-erupt crescendos of tactile composition, building to monumental levels of descriptive beauty and emotive power.

Featuring James from the phenomenal The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, it's easy to see why these two bands make great bedfellows. If you've been knocked sideways by the power of TGLH, then TIATS serve as a welcome journey into similar yet still different territories. 'Return' is definitely a must for those of you who love your instrumental music loud and in your face, yet still maintaining enough dignity to be intelligently presented and well worthy of your time and investment." (review from judaskissmagazine.co.uk).

return