Khuda – Iecava

Their music is cunning, spiral, watchful… it’s a sort of surveillance music

Their music is cunning, spiral, watchful… it’s a sort of surveillance music

 

 

http://www.fieldrecords.com http://www.khuda.tumblr.com  http://khuda.bandcamp.com

A fine record, tough, metallic and boasting enough elasticity in the arrangements to keep you interested. The thought of listening to another set of instrumental post rock tunes might have many running for the hills, primarily out of the sheer boredom of being faced yet again with such an offering. Luckily this is a cut above a lot of this genre’s material. 

A dreamy, serpentine melancholy infuses this record, and there’s a nice level of actual feeling present: the listener can engage, and there are more considerations on offer than just the intellectual.  Iecava sounds like it’s been recorded with an ear for well, (for want of a better phrase), “making music”.

Listening to a lot of this stuff does mean you begin to suspect that bands can just play to a set template and hang the consequences. But not with this LP. It doesn’t sound clever, or crass: there’s an engagement here. It has a great balance, avoiding being too pretty-pretty, or over-playing switching between loud and quiet passages. As such there’s a more sensual, reflective feel to a lot of what they do, with a track like Haykio you are reminded more of AR Kane than Mogwai or any of their ilk. Their music is cunning, spiral, watchful; tracks like the title track and Marchmen seem to inhabit their own world. It’s a sort of surveillance music; it feels perfect for a paranoid cop drama: you get the feeling with such cunning and watchful tracks like Don Benito and Tyche that they’ve been listening to DJ Shadow, too.