Post Tropical opens slowly, with pastoral soundscapes of sparse instrumentation and wistful falsetto-tinged vocals. After the initial triptych of songs, the imagery—although retaining the wistfulness throughout—widens into an intermittently pulsating flow of the meditative and the fragmentary that, with the closing notes, descends into the opening calm and quiet. While musically and lyrically harmoniously poetic, Post Tropical nonetheless feels and sounds like an exercise in ideas rather than a fully developed body of songs. Perhaps that is the point of the record. However, what is offered employs too heavily recurrent stylistic and production approaches to escape the impression of a work in progress. Consequently, Post Tropical comes across as overly drawn out for what it is. The album’s summary statement is its title track, while the sequence of “Glacier,” “Repeating,” and “Gold” maps out the record’s entire musical journey and foreshadows what, regrettably, is never to fully unfold.
[rating:3.5]
-Dalibor Mišina
