3 out of 5

Label: Lonely Voyage Records

Produced by: Adam Edwards (recorded by)

To get right to it: I’m not sure I know how to deal with “happy” instrumental rock. That’s not exactly the right term for it, as there’s plenty of joy in all the chugga chugga I listen to, but, I dunno – there was a nice, flat-ish space of prog and art rockers for, like, decades, leading up to Slint and Don Caballero and Tortoise setting the stage for certain directions of indie instrumentals for the 90s. I can’t quite track the where and how of it, but somewhere in the earlys 00s, I think internet accessibility gave us more exposure to more things, leading to bigger (but shorter) hype cycles that started to involve Godspeed!-style grandness, or Fucking Champs kinda throwback arena rock, and emo-pop from Polyvinyl starts to wander into this post-grunge era, which gives us “happy” instrumental rock: popcorn jams that are arena sized but played with mathy chops, albeit geared towards, like, just giving us the ultimate verse-chorus-verse high. It’s almost like elevator style instrumental rock, but with enough time signature changes to allow the indie kids to nod in approval.

Time goes on; instrumental rock kept evolving (or not) to some fun (or not) extremes of overly-complicated duelers, two-person bombast rockers, moody Russian Circles copycats, and so on, and so on. Oh, and djent. To be clear: I love some bands from most of these sub-sub-sub genres, and will pretty happily listen to any of it.

But that happy instrumental rock – the popcorn stuff that hits the notes you want – I dunno. It just kind of annoys me a bit. I appreciate the appeal, but that’s what I say when I’m kind of judging it. Like, I get it, some people like pop music. (Obvious subtext: I rarely do.)

Lost in the Riots debut, Stranger in the Alps, managed a pretty neat trick, though: it stuck a lot of those happy moments inbetween some excellent chugga chugga, and some deft percussion / guitar interplay, and some moody Red Sparowes awe-some passages. While that prevented the release from being a must-play, it was definitely an interesting one, and several years on they’d mature that sound into something a lot bolder and more satisfying on Bonds. Inbetween, though, their second album Move On, Make Trails went much further in on the happy thing. Not all in, as the first third of the album hits that same satisfying blend as their debut, with arena-sized riffs pummeled by impressive-as-heck noodling and almost punky rock out passages, and a track like Hey, Deathwish feels like a winky callout to the label, erring a bit more toward the group’s heavier side. Late into the album, we get Canyons, which looks ahead to Bonds’ more weighty material. But we’ve only covered about 1/3rd of MOMT’s material, with the other third having titles like ‘Halcyon Days of Summer,’ which, ugh, is exactly the kind of blissfully empty rockout it sounds like.

It’s skillfully played stuff, and I can’t deny that the music has toe-tapping ability; though I also find myself pretty bored by it. The album holds together with its periodic highlights, and even Halcyon has some moments that make my ears perk up, but the personality that was budding on the previous album kind of stalls here; Move On, Make Trails falls into a more faceless style of instrumental rock.