Demos

The Exploits of Elaine - Untitled EP

Alex Worsnip 00/00/0000

Rating: 4/5

The Exploits Of Elaine stand out amongst the many upstart post-rock bands out there from the word go. They care about aesthetics, sending this demo in superb hard-crafted packaging and boasting an attractive website. Of course, style can never defeat substance, even in post-rock, and the simple track titles are testament to the fact that The Exploits of Elaine are perfectly happy to let the music do the talking (a good thing too, as like so many of their post-rock peers, they don't feature vocals). What makes their sound interesting is that it has a far heavier edge to it than most of their ilk, with stabbing synths and wailing, experimental guitars characterising their dischordant, beatiful noise. They describe themselves, in a rare case of self-referencing accuracy, as somewhere between Godspeed! You Black Emporer and At The Drive-In, and the combination of cinematic soundscapes with fretboard-enacted destruction on lead track 'Alaska' verifies this. The building, textured feel to their tracks are genuinely different from the normal post-rock noise, with beautiful and memorable hooks working their way into all their tracks. The driving, soul-stirring 'Drop', the cutting and icy 'One More Soldier' and the epic closer 'Funeral Song', which builds into moaning, ear-bleeding, yet ecstatic white noise by the end all add something new. Occasionally production hampers their clarity or the depth of their sound, both important in post-rock, but this can only be expected, and for a demo, it is actually relatively well produced. Seriously promising.