If post-rock had a best friend (and if we assume that this anthropomorphized post-rock had the social skills enough to make friends), it’s safe to say he’d get along famously with shoegaze: the two share countless aesthetic similarities and, historically-speaking, have always combined successfully (Glissade, A Northern Chorus, et al). Ultimately, it’s fair to say that both genres put an emphasis on texture over direct melody and composition: memorable feelings over memorable choruses.

Bullets In Madison handily combines the best of both worlds on We Became Your Family When You Died - though that‘s not to say that it belongs in either genre. Instead, the band takes elaborate instrumentation and no fear of extended instrumental passages and gracefully mixes in lush guitar walls and hushed vocals. Take the opening cut, “Impossible Graves,” as the band’s mission statement: the driving beat is slowly buried in layers of guitar and violin until collapsing into reverbed vocals and piano, and it makes for an incredibly engaging first taste of what is to come.

Elsewhere, “Joel Found His Angel Cowering in the Garden” employs repetition beautifully, with a simple guitar line directing the entire seven-minute track with subtle flourishes of strings and spoken word storytelling. Alternatively, “Riots” puts the vocals at the forefront, dismissing any notion that the reverb and delay are any sort of cushioning or fallback. It begins with a deceptively simple guitar-drums-vocal rock song, for all intents and purposes, before erupting into Sigur Ros-lite majestic wordless crooning for its latter half.

The only trip-up here is that these grandiose ideas don’t quite extend to every song on the album. “Broken” and “Animals” feel slightly one-dimensional compared to some of the more intricate work, and the constantly subdued vocals do make me pine for more exploration of the ambitious strains in the aforementioned “Riots.”

That being said, We Became Your Family is never overly dull or uninteresting; it is through and through a gorgeous album. “St. Jude” exemplifies this, with its slow motion strings eventually backed by a tittering electronic beat that they plough through elegantly and eventually drop behind to make way for the quietly climactic finish. The band hits its peak when it gives its ideas more room to breathe, though it must be applauded for making this a diverse affair: it can be easy to get lost in these all-too-pretty trappings and  forgo any sort of grit or excitement.

There are definitely grand ambitions here, and by and large the band defies any easy categorization without being consciously “experimental.” Instead, Bullets in Madison samples the best of the more ‘left-field’ genres - post-rock, shoegaze, electronica, ambient - and combines them into a beautiful piece of work. It’s a refreshing combination of genuine ingenuity and a refusal to candidly wear any direct influences on its sleeves, and the album is undoubtedly worth a listen from anyone whose fancy is even slightly tickled by the genre lists above.

-Calvin Young