4 out of 5

Label: Permafrost / Ged / Cheap Satanism / Chemin de la folie / Quixote rpm / Baboon fish label / Epicericords

Produced by: L’Austral

A 25+ minute “Opus in E Flat” (Opus en mi bémol), as played by the 8-piece Chafouin Orchestra.

Chafouin, as we now know – over ten albums and years into their career – flex along the indie rock / intrumental post-rock spectrum, bloating in and out of flighty indulgences not at all in sync with however many people are in the band at the moment. The ‘Orchestra’ in this case provides the band with a very organic way of achieving volume, as the track ebbs and flows during its runtime to spotlight strings, or wind instruments, or vocal chants. It is very “Chafouin” at its core: a kind of pleasant but vaguely angular floating melody, vocals humming in a background layer, said melody catchy and evasive in one go; the key differentiator here is how this sound is extended into an opus, letting sections drift to a close while an instrument carries on passively, giving way to the next section. It’s dreamy, and then it builds and gets awesomely loud.

The CD version has an “acoustic” take on the same song, which is kind of funny because the main version isn’t too plugged in – just some feedback and minimal distortion on the guitars. However, the CD (or digital) acoustic version if worth extra attention, as the production here seems to favor the more melodic bits, and less-so the noise-adjacent segues that link those bits together – they just require a tad more punctuation to land. In the acoustic take, though, everything is played loosely throughout, so even the noisy moments have a sing-song quality that really works well with the production.