Talons are a dynamic proposition, that’s the least you can say about them. The Hereford sextet are another one from the increasingly impressive pile of instrumental bands as inspired by post-hardcore as post-rock and mathrock but their secret weapon on top of that comes in their dual violinists, always pushing forward with dramatic passages and screeches. Apparently intended as a single piece of music, debut album Hollow Realm isn’t afraid to head towards pounding grandiosity, energised as much by slow building surface tension as heavy Isis-approaching passages. Before now Talons could always go megalithic alongside their intricacies, but at album length it’s full on Hollywood disaster score, veering from dramatic highs to cataclysmic lows.

Right from the off, ‘St Mary Will Be The Death Of Us All’ cagily brings the album in on a feedback drone before igniting and then exploding in thunderous drums and angry guitars, never allowing itself to settle despite the math-y stop-start gymnastics when there’s still explosive circular riffs to be dredged up. Over six minutes it breaks down into moments that while slower still attempt to trample everything underfoot into so much rubble before pressing down hard on the accelerator and pulling out another set of rolling percussion and guitar pyrotechnics.

And so on with the apocalypse. The violins rush and duel on ‘Peter Pan’, get plucked pizzicato fashion on ‘Iris’, soar majestically but all too briefly towards the end of ‘Impala’ before some rapid fire Adebisi Shank-esque tapped runs that almost themselves act as respite, and everywhere add their air of something grandiose keeping its head just above cacophonic waters. The two shortest tracks on the album aside (though ‘Great Railroads’ initially has a very The World At War feel), even when things do calm down a little, as in a couple of passages of ‘In The Shadows Of Our Stilted Homes’, it still comes across as a soundtrack for a panning shot of a post-apocalyptic landscape, and you’re still never more than a couple of minutes away from the return of the distortion and militaristic drumrolls. And then comes the ten minute closer ‘Hollow Depth’. Heavy riffs batter down the doors or plunge down metaphorical lift shafts, little solos twist themselves inside out and prog rears its head in the many quick-slow change movements, heading from slow and picked out to stentorian like a louder Sigur Ros and then, for the majority, back to the heavy stuff. It doesn’t so much end as finally run out of breath, or maybe battle numbers.

Such visceral energy comes at a price to the sustainability of the album as a whole. The ability to sustain such muscular highs, intricate but peppered like scatter gunshots with micro-riffs and the drums of the seven thunders, is impressive but over time overbusy. Talons can do quiet and, more often, they can do loud, but disappointingly given the promise of their previous work there’s little of the attention holding sense of build and release that a Maybeshewill give, where the floatier passages are almost inexorably building up to the extended thrash. Here they seem more to just launch into it as if to indicate they’ve had enough of post-rock pastorialism. Technically spectacular, boundless in their forcefulness, but something seems to have been lost in full length fleshing out translation.