Review: Endless Floods ‘Passages’
Coming as it does a neat two years after Endless Floods’ last album, and just before a few days of clear skies and soporific heat, Passages could not escape comparison to the bright warmth of Rites Futurs. However, where that record carried a distinct ‘summer tips to autumn’ feel, this one does not hold back from being bright and sunny. Like its predecessor, the opening song Visions drops us straight into the full feel of the record.
It also shows us what Endless Floods intend to do with these songs; there is an unabashed post-rock sound and approach, with emotive force to the fore and a showcase of the harmony and bright vocal leads they introduced on the aforementioned Rites Futurs. We also hear something new in the very prog runs that close out the song and open the next. For a jaded, heard-it-all-before writer, it’s hard not to hear a big drop of Elder in the mix, but we are soon back in the heady choral declaration of Deuxième Monde, which is distinctively their own. And yes, my jaded palate will find parts of Passages overly rich and start to quibble, however, the artistry of the band’s voice speaks louder than that grumbling old man. Let him sit back and give someone else space.
Where the tension in their earlier work hung in austerity and glimpses of softness, they are now working in a mode that pulls tension from simplicity and grandiosity, delicacy and heft. There is something in the harmonic resolutions and the way the songs progress that seems complex, yet quite natural and obvious. Of course it runs this way, and of course that anthemic bombast ends up in this quiet piece of piano. And, of course, there is space to slow right down and enjoy Louise Dehaye’s voice in full, close-mic’d patience for the first minutes of Liminal.
working in a mode that pulls tension from simplicity and grandiosity, delicacy and heft…
There’s almost a Bohren & der Club of Gore noir about the brushed drums and spooky synth, and of course, this finds us drawn into a fathoms-deep development that, sinking ever deeper, finds the underlying distress and brings it into the room, all stinking and heavy with seafloor sediment. It’s in moving like this that Endless Floods are really pushing their expression; the fact that my dry cataloguing of the album keeps breaking down when I try to write about Liminal is testimony to its power. Our kind guides are also willing to offer us redemption, and the near ten minutes of Primordial certainly delivers that across more ghostly momentum, rock-band excess, and quiet acoustic resolution, travelling a long way while holding us safely in place.
As with Rites Futurs, Endless Floods afford us enough suggestion to build our own inference and association from their work. The minimal cover art perhaps suggests a breaking out of heavy rocks; perhaps if the last record was a pyre and a forge, these are passages to a new place. They declare that they would do something different with heaviness and beauty, having something to say and a way to say it, which is surely the best we can hope for from a group of artists. Onwards!
Label: Permafrost Records | Araki Records | Yoyodyne Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Harry Holmes
