It would be easy to label God Is An Astronaut another post-rock band, yet that it is not. Next to the strong shoegaze infusion that illustrates the band’s merits, interviews have shown that this band is not generic post-rock, because the band has never heard any post-rock when this was recorded. The same is applicable to My Bloody Valentine and shoegaze in general. What the band does seem to have taken as an influence is Massive Attack, complete with quasi-dance beats.

This effort is in a few aspects quite different from their past album, The End Of The Beginning. We find the same emotional, dreamy and muddy shoegaze guitars, the same catchy riffs, the same electronic mood-boosters, yet we also benefit the merits of real and really good drummer, and the presence of more and better constructed crescendos. Again, the record surrounds in a close to apocalyptical, the song-titles say it all, or a spacey and slightly futuristic atmosphere. Closest comparisons are Man Or Astoman, and especially Mountain Men Anonymous, yet God Is An Astronaut are more consistent in their songs themselves, and continuously handle the same style throughout their albums. The band has the rare quality of knowing exactly when to play what, and not let the quality of a song drop when moving on from a climax, which makes it very accessible for something that is mainly based on post-rock. The genre-defining crescendos are very well executed and stay varied in structure, while the attached climaxes are heavier than ever, involving double bass pedalling and epic guitar explosions more than once.

The band uses a big screen during their live shows, on which videos of humanistic nature are visible. Due to this, the strong emotional sense of the music might be amplified live, but the music itself is not really capable of conjuring images. It is capable of transferring a beautiful sense of melancholy, though, along with the emptiness of epic space. All in all, All Is Violent, All Is Bright is a strong and relatively original record that would be perfect for a person who has trouble with the abstractness of post-rock, yet wants to grow into the genre.

MP3: God Is An Astronaut – Fragile

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