4 out of 5

Label: Art For Blind

Produced by: John ‘Spud’ Murphy and Ian Chestnutt

Long Live The Bogwalrus is blistering instrumental math-rock, crashing through your speakers with opening County Council’s stuttering bass and drums – bringing to mind the direction Dysrhythmia started to go down before getting distracted by proggy wizardry – and continuing on through a slew of other name-checkable referential styles. The trio of Ten Past Seven produce a wildly impressive, tight, breathless clatter, making sure to leave plenty of space in their sound for songs to have proper ebb and flow, and also finding climactic moments that don’t just rely on breaks or volume, though the group certainly does that too.

Despite similarities to other stalwarts in the scene, what’s most impressive – besides TPS’ utter skill, with no note out of place but the production allowing that precision to sound pretty raw, and “live” – is that nothing on Long Live The Bogwalrus sounds derivative, and it also all flows together. Council is hard rock, for example, but the album has stretches of Godspeed! or Del Rey-esque warm explorations, and tracks ping-pong between those relative extremes without it being showy or disconnected. Even when they’re doing what I’d consider a pretty clear tribute, with a very What Burns / American Don-era Don Cab tune (which even sounds like a Don Cab song name – ‘Personalities of the Great Tit’), TPS avoid sounding like, y’know, a band ripping of Don Cab, and instead sound like Ten Past Seven… writing a Don Caballero tune. It speaks to the command of craft the players have, and their confidence in wielding that.

Though there are spots where the group maybe pushes too hard in whichever subgenre they’re exploring, to the detriment of the track – Council has some totally post-rock stop-and-starts which feel a bit forced; something relatively “epic” like King Lear almost seems avoidant of letting the shoe drop on some riffage – my favorite thing about Bogwalrus is that it’s unapologetically math rock. Now that we’re however long into a scene that probably had its shape sharpened in the 90s, I think the more modern takes on this make some participants believe they need to go further, and not be pigeonholed as, solely, a math-rock band. I’m pretty sure that’s not the case here. Ten Past Seven are celebrating complex, rocking, guitar-bass-drums instrumentals, and we get to reap the joy of the awesome tunes they’ve sown.