In the beginning, there was folk music*. Then God created the universe and bestowed upon us electricity, and man used it to sculpt the almighty electric guitar. Using this newfound weapon, man then created rock music, which was in direct opposition to this universal folk music. Man celebrated, having created a more powerful, emotional form of expression than God himself could produce. Many, many years passed under rock's reign, and man was happy. Eventually a little good-for-nothing, twerpy kid decided that rock was formulaic and boring, and so he ventured out to change the face of rock. His strategy was simple: use rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes; take the all powerful electric guitar and let it be his muse, an outlet for his effectual experiences. Break the barriers of rock down, pulling from the most obscure branches of musical theory in crafting the ultimately diverse form of art. In a word: post-rock.
Post-rock was weird, and it was quirky, but somehow it worked. This twerpy kid took all these fringe genres and molded them into his own vision. Others followed. Remarkably, people achieved vastly different sounds by using a similar process, calling from different musical worlds en route to crafting their unique vision. Song lengths stretched out far past the horizon. Four minutes used to be the standard length for a song, but now 'tracks' experimented past the 10 minute marker, often far exceeding its boundaries. The sky was the limit; anything was possible.
But all good things must come to an end. Soon it seemed as if there were more bands in the post-rock crowd than in the traditional rock crowd. Many began to decry post-rock, saying that it had succumbed to the stagnation of rock that it initially began to avoid. But such a failing was inevitable, once it began to be embraced by artists, and therefore fans. There's only so much room for growth in the finite musical space generated by permutations of existing genres -- only so many prefixes you can append onto a word before it becomes a nonsensical syntactic nightmare. Thus a new goal was set: to collapse the genre back to its starting point without sacrificing the trademark techniques that had been developed over time. Twenty minute tracks were boiled down to 10, then 8, 6, and 4 minutes. Everything became an instant gratification, exploding in an intense wave of energy that spat out descriptors like "hyper" and "neo." Leaders in this movement were idolized by critics and fans -- Saxon Shore, Caspian, and UpcDownc became household names. Once again, all was well in the world of post-rock, if only for a short time. This world is in constant need of fresh material and is unable to survive long without it. Perhaps this is what makes it such a unique movement, as it tries to satisfy an always ill-content crowd.
Young upstart Codes in the Clouds' goal is then clear: to stretch the condensed form of post-rock back into its traditional setting. The catch? To accomplish this task without modifying the shortened time length set by their immediate peers. The band's debut 7", Distant Street Lights/Fractures, staunchly succeeds at this task, providing the listener with two tracks that sound as if they're actually much longer. The vinyl begins with "Distant Street Lights," which opens with fierce drumming and twinkling guitars. This is much more abrupt than we're used to, as if we've just walked halfway into the band's set and we quietly just standing still to try to get into the groove. And here it is, Codes in the Clouds quickly recedes into some quiet guitar strumming and glacial drumming. We're sucked into this for all about two minutes, but it really feels like they've gotten us wrapped up in this icy world for at least three times as long. When they do surface with the gloriously epic finale, we don't at all feel shortchanged that the quiet part was highly sacrificed en route to this climax, mainly because we don't really notice anything missing from the composition at all. "Fractures" functions under similar constraints, first rising slowly from the previous track's wake and then hitting the audience with another deadly dose of electric guitar. Again, the build is so well performed that I could swear on my post-rock handbook that this thing is actually about ten minutes long, but surprisingly it clocks in at just under five.
Codes in the Clouds effectively asks if the quiet/loud formula really needs to be as rigid as everyone has made it out to be in the past. Do tracks really need to lumber along (excessively) for six minutes before getting to the point? Is that really a worthwhile venture? Historically, I think it is a worthwhile path, for without it, I doubt we could fully enjoy these super condensed bands as much as we do. But now that the figurative cherry has been popped for several years, and we see that bands can get just as much diversity out of 5 minutes as 20, I'm running out of excuses to explain rather lackluster releases from recent powerhouses as Mono, Explosions in the Sky, and Do Make Say Think. If they weren't already wrapped up in their own music, they'd probably know better. Codes in the Clouds does.
-Lee Whitefield
*:also referred to as 'pre-rock' around these parts.