Silver Ray - 'Homes For Everyone'
With their fourth album, Melbourne trio Silver Ray have produced a record of pounding elegance, proving that while it might be over the crest, the whole ‘post-rock’ thing hasn’t quite exhausted itself yet. Good. They’ve pared things down this time around, creating an album that is both more contained and intimate than their previous effort ‘Humans’, while nonetheless possessing a stately grandeur. It’s kind of the aural equivalent of an old church that has been renovated for more secular purposes.
Opener ‘You Know The Truth’ gets right to business, drummer Brett Poliness underpinning things with an unrelenting march while Julitha Ryan carves out gargantuan shapes on piano before Cam Butler joins in on electric guitar and rips the whole thing open.
The band have altered their more usual process of simply recording live in the studio, augmenting their existing instrumental combination of drums, guitar and piano, by overdubbing with a variety of percussion, bass, guitar loops and synths. The spacey synth melody that sails above Ryan’s flowing ostinato on ‘Prove It, Don Quixote!’ is particularly lovely, as are the electronic whorls that pervade the late-night ambience ‘Not Far To Go’.
‘Homes For Everyone’ does feel somewhat more modest in its aspirations than that of some of their peers, lacking the almost ecstatic climaxes of Explosions In The Sky, or the sense of apocalyptic dread of Mogwai. In a way this works out to their benefit however, the shorter format of the songs being more suited to an approach that forgoes either extreme in favour of something more unassuming and mature.
The best example of this is probably penultimate track ‘The Streets Of Melbourne’, a moving homage to the band’s hometown that seems to accept the place as it is, warts and all. It also features a string section that joins in to support the melody with simply gorgeous results. This is an accomplished album from an excellent group of instrumentalists.