Russian Circles - Enter (2006)

This is an appeal on behalf of us, music fans the world over, to you, post-rocking instrumental acts of no particular intelligence: please, try harder. The bar has been raised dozens of times since Young Team, and it’s about time ninety per cent of you caught up. It is a fact, is it not, that the majority of instrumental rock bands filling basement clubs and loft venues with crisp arpeggio and wandering basslines on a weekly basis are, actually, Fairly Dull. Few that these eyes (and more importantly ears) have witnessed have achieved that perfect balance between distortion and delicacy, aggression and sympathy, nuclear bombast and soft cherry blossom. Most spin out the same idea over several ‘songs’ and expect congratulations for their astute sense of compositional uniqueness, when in fact they display exactly nothing of the sort: they’re playing it safe and sound-alike, simple and effective but not affecting. So fuck them: this is the bar raised ‘til it’s so nearly out of reach, only touchable through unsteady tip-toes and elongated digits. This is Russian Circles’ debut and it blows many an alleged peer out of the water entirely. (Mike Diver, drownedinsound.com)

Download: http://lix.in/-432201