Anticipation can do some strange things to your brain. Before concerts fans nervously chatter about how excited they are to see who’s playing or cover up their feelings with day-to-day platitudes. It’s sort of the same brain twist that happens before a fireworks display. Even before it all starts, you can almost picture the pin-wheeling purples and gyrating greens over your head─ stretched out over a taut black fabric filled with white dots.

The Swedish post-rock band captures that teetering anticipation perfectly on the appropriately titled 1:37 minute opener, “Heads Gone.” Field recordings of people talking below an animated firework display bleed into a lone voice. The lead vocalist sounds like Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, circa The Sophtware Slump. The guitars billow and echo like bells in a tower and roll right into the second song, “My God, It’s Full of Stars”

The rest of the album uses vocals sparingly. At the end of “My God, It’s Full of Stars” a recorded feminine voice states “you never saw anything / you were not there / you don’t know anything / as you can notice there’s a big desert out her / we can just take you out here and nobody will ever find your bodies.” “46th Street” continues the spiral into infinity that “My God, It’s Full of Stars” started. The guitars slice through the haze with abandon, leaving fire trails and coughing distortion. The landscape is “epic,” to use an over-used term in discussing the type of music Aerial makes. At times it can also overwrought in length.

Aerial brings the term “face-melting” to a whole different level entirely. On “You Will All Die, All Things Will” the pace is frenetic and edges on the aesthetic The Twilight Sad messed with on their garrison of bull-dozer assault heard on Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters (on “The Dark Star Deters”) as well. The air is riddled with acerbic guitars that streak in blazing shots of disaster. “Youth and Student Travel” serves as an aural cleanser after all the ferocious behavior. A droning minimal ambience lassoes the listener from the brink of oblivion.

All wide-eyed and open-eared descriptions aside (The Sentinel is ripe with them), we see a band that has stepped forward on their second release. Many of their tricks are not unknown in the post-rock crowd though. They abandon many of the protracted jams found on the menacing “Black Rain From the Bombing”. They also sound less like a chiaroscuro Sonic Youth Jr. band. The Swedes’ acrobatic acerbity now tumbles harder from the heavens, like the percussive profusion of Explosions in the Sky or the harder edge of a Mono instrumental jam. Aerial look horizontally as much as they look up, keeping some of their abstract instrumentalism from the past behind closed doors this time.

Despite welcome changes, the band’s heavy air gets knocked out of the group’s expansive lungs towards the end. In context the blazing theatrics that precede slower songs like “Secret Goddess” and the chiming “Welcome to Australia” needed a respite for fear of anchoring good intentions. Like the spooling feeling you get after the smoke settles and lights dim at a firework extravaganza, you gather the fact that Aerial can’t stay in flight for a protracted length of time with such a heavy guitar repertoire. Light gossamer threads and filigreed percussion don’t tie this post-rock instrumental together. Aerial’s flights of fancy and nose-diving guitars may be as heavy as a ton of bricks but they sure do pack a wallop.
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Links
Aerial [official site] [myspace]