AMS album of the week: The Albatross

Foxing released an EP last year called Old Songs. I did not care for it. It was everything post-rock-tinged emo shouldn’t be. The three songs were overthought and overstretched, but worst of all, they were really dull. It was an emo band trying to be a post-rock band with little success. Since then they’ve appeared on a few splits that I’ve completely ignored and I didn’t really plan on giving them any more of my time. However, I saw The Albatross getting a lot of positive comments and decided to give them another chance. I’m really glad I did. It’s ruddy bloody good. The longest song here is still under 5 minutes, and the long tedious build ups are all but gone. This isn’t post-rock tracks with emo thrown in, which they’ve proved doesn’t work. This is emo with post-rock thrown in, and it definitely does work. It’s still more post-rocky than The World is a Beautiful Place and I am No Longer Afraid to Die, but it’s not too much. The instrumentation in ‘Inuit’ could be taken straight from the loud part of an Explosions in the Sky track, but the addition of strained vocals makes it still feel exciting. The crescendo towards the end of ‘The Medic’ is beautiful, whilst both parts of ‘Bit by a Dead Bee’ are superb, one pretty and other haunting. Lyrically, it’s absolutely spot on, with ‘The Medic’ in particular being absolutely heartbreaking. There are a few duds here. Opener ‘Bloodhound’ is pretty dreary, whilst the final track, ‘Quietus’, is probably one that won’t make it into most of my listens to this album. The production could definitely be a hell of a lot better, especially the drums, although this seems like a fairly petty complaint about a record of this magnitude. Limited to just 500 LPs by their American label, with no British label pressing any, this isn’t even a big release by emo standards. Hopefully this one will receive the attention it deserves so they are given a bigger budget next time around. This record is obviously not going to set the world alight. It’s aimed at a small niche, and outside of that it probably won’t receive any attention at all. It’s a shame though, because it’s really great. I would highly recommend this to fans of either emo or post-rock, so give it a go, maybe you’re part of the niche and you don’t even know it…