Review: Codes In The Clouds - As the Spirit Wanes

Artist: Codes In The Clouds
Title: As the Spirit Wanes
Format: Full-length
Year: 2011
Label: Erased Tapes
Genre: Post-rock
Rating: 80 / 100

Finally, after two years, the second Codes in the Clouds album has been released, well actually it was already released this January, but as there is a giant wave of quality records coming out these months, I missed it. Too bad, because I really enjoyed their 2009 debut album Paper Canyon. Being aware of the fact that Codes In The Clouds isn't really the best known post-rock band to mankind, an introduction to this British band could be welcome. As you probably already read in the description, Codes In The Clouds is a post-rock band, one of many, and yes, very similar to both Explosions In The Sky and Mogwai. Originality in the field of post-rock is an extremely hard thing to accomplish being a band formed in 2007, and indeed, they fail. Is this necessarily a bad thing? No, not really, but they might have to confront the issue of not being noticed in the giant melancholic grey mass called modern post-rock.

The music on As The Spirit Wanes will definitely not be the problem, from an objective point of view, this really is qualitatively well-written music, ignoring the standard rock patterns, and thus more or less following the standard post-rock patters. But besides the soft tremolo-picking, dynamic song construction and associated climaxes, there is the subtle addition of some more traditional instruments, including a violin on You And I Change Like Seasons, a trumpet on The Reason In Madness, In Love and glockenspiel on Washington. Not in a way Godspeed You! Black Emperor uses them, but as a nice addition to the overall guitar sound, especially the way the trumpet is used in this kind of music is pretty renewing and actually sounds very good. Too bad it only appears on one of the ten tracks on this album.

As the Spirit Wanes is a very, very decent record, and could even be described as a great album if it would have been released before this huge wave of modern post-rock bands. In 2011, I am afraid Codes In The Clouds just lack a little bit of quality to really stand out, mainly because their sound is more post-rock than post-rock itself. As a consequence, I will give this album 80 / 100, even though it might be possible I will rarely listen to this album again.

In the name of love, spread some love,

Selwin.