Copyright © 2006 Hydrahead
1. Silver
2. Star
3. Wolves
4. Dead Eyes
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Ever heard the phrase "Think outside of the box?" This CD is box. Despite the pleasant appearance of this music, its tendency to cram itself into a more normalized asthetic has cramped the throwing arm of this composer. Jesu's foundational post-rock has modulated into a Slowdive-inspired shoegazer style, with drafty pop choruses wending their way through curtainlike suspensions of harmony. The effect emphasizes the vocal and the necessity of a simple unambiguous song structure in which to wrap chaotic and ambiguous melodies, but this restricts Jesu to more linear types of expression: where once it was otherworldly, now it is earthbound, and even if it is no less attractive it is less intense because it has less to say. While this sortie is undoubtedly well-composed and melodies are not as purely ziggurat-regular as they tend to be in this spacy, stoned-out genre of harmonically interleaved sonic implication, and while the trademark Jesu conclusive culminations to riff threads are still here, there is some doubt as to why one would listen to this maudlin, self-obsessed fuzzpop which regresses into itself when there are previous Jesu, Godflesh and Final CDs that learned, unlike "Silver," after emotion the art of flying.
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