A colleague of mine once told me that Kafka would have never been a writer if he led a happy life. Does this mean that only bad fortune can be a source of inspiration? Certainly not, even if the vast majority of great art admired to this day was produced by tortured souls. An artist can be inspired by anything and everything, but what I always believed was most important was the ability, or the inclination if you like, to see and describe what's strange and magical about the mundane.

I first became aware of Northvia's music after listening to their previous album, Pure Magic, an album inspired by the band's love for their hometown's NBA team, the Orlando Magic.Pure Magic was a rather typical post-rock album, revealing a band that was trying to find its own voice, but struggling to produce something out of the ordinary. In no way did it prepare me for what would follow when I got my hands on their latest album, Venice.Venice, released by the wonderful Lost Children net label, is inspired by the documentary "Venice: Behind the Mask" by Marco Gentile and Ryan Simon, and the Venice Carnival, which, as the band informs us, "can appear purely driven by entertainment and pleasure, yet, underneath lie themes of death, rebirth and social and cultural identity." And it is indeed their attempt to examine what lies underneath the mask that makes Venice become a magical, musical journey.

While at first sight Northvia do appear to be a very typical post-rock band (whatever the term means nowadays), they're in many ways the exact opposite of everything fans usually think of when they hear of the genre. While most post-rock bands have a tendency to give really long titles to pieces that last forever, Northvia are men of few words, choosing one-word titles for their songs which, with the notable exception of the aptly-titled "Closer", don't last more than three-and-a-half minutes. As Simon Reyonlds said when he coined the term, post-rock, while being characterized by the usage of rock instrumentation, is not rock. In order to survive, post-rock requires albums such as Venice that take an entirely new direction, and bands such as Northvia, willing to make their own kind of music.

That willingness alone is not enough, of course, to make original music.Venice, however, is an album that lives up to what the band intended to create. On the surface, it is an album full of joy, optimism and confidence, much like a carnival. But, what hides underneath the surface is insecurity, fear and sadness. The ultimate tragedy of one's life becomes a source of entertainment for someone else. This is the album's theme and Northvia describe it perfectly.

But where they really excel as a band is at how precise every note is. Drums, guitars and keyboards are fully synchronized, striking at the right moment, producing music of utter beauty. Observing the carnival from a distance, they remain unaffected by the happenings and are able to describe them for what they really are. There isn't one track you want to skip, as every moment of the album finds its rightful place. There are no highlights, as the album works as a whole, but my favorites were the very intense and electronic "Dragqueens" and the beautiful "Closer", the best song Explosions in the Sky never wrote.

Their precision often reminds me of a computer. But while computers are perfect and therefore predictable, human nature is flawed. To achieve something that resembles perfection, one needs to be fully devoted to what he or she does. The fact they do it in less than twenty-five minutes is a wonder. Or maybe not; if they had let it last longer it might not have been as great as it is. Northvia succeeds as a band because they know when to stop.

-John Kontos