Our Brother The Native Make Amends for we are Merely Vessels by: Alex De Petro Mon:24-Mar-08 Label: Fat Cat Year: 2008 WB rating 68 out of 100

Make Amends for we are Merely Vessels is an interesting yet derivative album from Our Brother the Native, yet another pretentious Godspeed You! Black Emperor influenced Post-rock group.

Experimental music at its absolute wankiest, post-rock is a genre which has a lot of potential, but often gets bogged down by self-righteousness, self-indulgence and incredibly imitative movements. In many ways Make Amends for we are Merely Vessels is a microcosm for the genre as a whole, and so this review will in some ways function as a critique of Post-rock itself.

At its best Post-rock is made up of a subtle blend of different instrumental styles, performed on traditional rock and roll instruments, however many more current Post-rock groups are reverting to utilizing long periods of distortion, slow and pointless ambient ‘soundscapes’ and mixes of ‘borrowed’ or ‘found’ sounds (this has in fact led to many seminal Post-rock groups such as Tortoise and Mogwai rejecting the term in recent times).

The album’s opening track ‘Rejoice’ provides a good example of this: the first movement is a collection of quasi-industrial guitar and percussion sounds, before a guitar line almost identical to that of Godspeed’s classic track ‘East Hastings’ from 1997’s F♯A♯∞ album is repeated for a few minutes (this level of imitation can be forgiven as Our Brother The Native’s members are aged 16, 16 and 18), eventually bleeding into a dull and depressing period of mixed sounds. While in 1994 or 1995 this may have seemed an avant-garde and even controversial rejection of what rock music had become and was becoming, now it seems merely tired, unnecessary and unimportant. And to those who argue the hidden depth and profundity in post-rock, one must ask what hidden depth there is in a jumble of sampled sounds arranged in a seemingly random way? Too much of post-rock sounds the same, and there is little enjoyment, let alone insight or inspiration, gained out of listening to different bands from across the globe make barely different sounds.

Most of the rest of the album is in the same vein, although it does have some intriguing points. ‘Trees Part I’ is a melancholy and at times haunting track, utilizing ethereal backing vocals to great effect, and even providing a somewhat positive use for heavily distorted guitar as a base for other instruments to work off. ‘Trees Part II’ is another excellent track, the strongest point of the album. It picks up where Part I left off, introducing another very Godspeed guitar with some unintelligible murmuring in the background, before the real highlight of the track begins, Chaz Knapp’s rolling yet completely rock-solid drum line kicking in. This is what post-rock should be: strikingly innovative. However even when Our Brother The Native do provide something innovative, such as these two key tracks, the listener still feels that they have heard it all before, and that is the major flaw of the genre as a whole.