4 out of 5

Label: trace / untrace records

Produced by: Space Bats, Attack! and Samdrub Dawa

You Canadians can keep your Godspeeds; The West Coast can keep its glittery post-rock; East Coast can keep its math-rock to itself; I’ll be chilling out with Space Bats, Attack! in Dunedin, NZ.

SB, A! do instrumental rock. They have two guitars, bass, and drums. They shuffle in dreamily, kinda quiet, some goofy smiles, ya know. And then they just start kicking your ass. I mean – wow – what did you even do to deserve this walloping? It’s nonstop; it’s brutal. Oh, and then it does stop. And SB,A! are all quiet and a lil’ goofy again.

That’s not exactly the Oort experience, as Space Bats aren’t the types who do the quiet to loud shtick necessarily, but it’s more meant to be representative of how surprisingly heavy this group can be, while also kind of surreptitiously massaging it into the mix – like you’re listening to something melodic and headbobby, and then you realize it’s actually been guitar mangling solos and pummeling drums for the past few minutes. This isn’t your flashy instrumental group, in other words; they’re rather unassuming – or more favorably, disarming – though in a way that makes their music hard to classify. It’s absolutely rock, though the group casually avoids a lot of the rules of when an instrumental track is supposed to break one way or the other, overplaying and underplaying it in baffling but wholly “oh, that’s actually perfect” ways.

But I would go back to the unassuming tag to underline that Oort, both in the way the songs are constructed and the kind of soft, unpunctuated production, doesn’t rattle the ol’ speakers. It’s not made to, I don’t think, but still – it prevents the album from having an overall arc; it’s a song-by-song affair. The plus side is that makes for very solid experiences throughout, with each track a complete journey in and of itself, and is in turn very repeatable. Of course, the flip-side to being somewhat undefinable is that it’s easier to describe Godspeeds and so on on their own terms, whereas I’m kind of navigating around telling you what Space Bats, Attack!’s Oort isn’t.

Whatever man. I gotta be in a specific mood for glittery post-rock and Russian Circles’ moodiness; Oort is always there for me, and I bet with more exposure, I’d be comparing these other bands to SB, A! instead.