Post-punk has never been so multifaceted, unique and well thought-out. At peak moments, these songs seem to spread through your mind like a series of small musical explosions. The instrumental portions of Leaving Our Homes (about two thirds of the disc) are an impressive blend of Brian Eno-esque ambience and modern punk, offering more variety than the former and more thoughtfulness than the latter.
The disc's less impressive moments are mad punk songs, ignorantly releasing all of the raw sound and emotion that was so beautifully controlled on the stronger tracks. These songs offer, at most, a break from the well-arranged instrumentals, but they're few in number and always quite short.
Leaving Our Homes' third song, "Our System", is one of the more ambient tracks, expanding a wandering guitar riff first with a cello, then with a trumpet. The song is beautifully arranged; the separate instruments merge to create a new, fragile world of sound.
The disc seems to culminate on the "Dies", which meanders through various intensities and atmospheres, coupled with a double set of lyrics sung over each other by two different voices, Halo Bender-style.
Whether you listen to Leaving Our Homes while walking city streets or while lying in your bed late at night, it delivers where so many envelope-pushing CDs simply fail. Out of a desire to be different, indie albums too often become unjustly weird; besides having no aesthetic value, they're simply hard to listen to (and yes, I'm thinking primarily, but not solely, of the Elephant 6). It is therefore refreshing to hear a relatively experimental album that, for the most part, triumphs.
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