CD Review: Russian Circles, "Geneva"

Making instrumental post-rock is a delicate art. There's lots of risks involved. If there aren't enough heavy parts, it'll be boring. If there's too many, it won't be beautiful anymore. If there's too little experimentation, it will demand vocals, and if there's too much, it will be interpreted as "trying too hard." On the first two albums by Chicago power trio Russian Circles, Enter and Station, all of the relevant balances were struck perfectly and veritable classics of the genre were unleashed. On their new record, Geneva, however, the band falls just shy of maintaining their superiority.

The elements are all there, but there's the overwhelming sense that the best parts have already been done, and better (and indeed done better by Russian Circles themselves) and that the new parts are mostly without merit. The title track, for example, starts as a beautiful piece of music, certain to erupt in an Explosions in the Sky-esque crescendo, but instead incorporates an obnoxious bass line and ends with a bizarre drum pattern that sounds utterly manufactured. All would potentially be forgiven if the beautiful intro wasn't notably less beautiful than the beautiful parts of songs on their previous records.

There are some truly enlightening moments, though. "When the Mountain Comes to Muhammad" features a couple of firsts for the band. It opens with lonesome guitar line draped over sample, presumably from some sort of religious broadcast, the first sample that Russian Circles has used. As the song builds and builds and eventually crescendos, beautiful melodies from the guitar and bass weave in and out of melodies played on trumpet and trombone. This is an example of integrating unusual instrumentation into a common song structure to a meaningful end, and many post-rock and post-metal acts could take notes from it. But these wonderful moments are less evident on this album than on the previous two.

Geneva is a pretty good post-rock record, and "When the Mountain Comes to Muhammad" is the finest post-rock song of the year, but for someone looking to get into the genre, there's better starting points, including the back catalog of this very band. Hopefully Russian Circles' members recall how to write songs like "Death Rides a Horse" and "Harper Lewis" by the time they set out to record again.