Hypomanie have seemingly lost their creative edge after
A City in Mono, with their newest release Calm
Down, You Weren’t Set on
Fire being highly derivative of
Godspeed You! Black
Emperor and many other post rock bands such as Mogwai and This
Will Destroy You. In fact, the whole album seems ripped off from
Godspeed’s track
Sleep. The high pitched wailing guitars sound the same and even the melodies are very similar. However, whilst
Sleep was an atmospheric powerhouse,
Hypomanie lack much of the atmospheric prowess that
Godspeed were so effortlessly able to create.
It’s quite hard to pinpoint the exact reason why I’m ambivalent to this album. Calm
Down, You Weren’t Set on
Fire is pretty much just another example of instrumental post rock so really, it shouldn’t bother me that much. I do greatly enjoy instrumental post rock from time to time and it’s certainly not something I’d expect to drive me up the wall. This album on the other hand drives me completely insane. It’s really hard to describe why this album is so irritating other than it just is. The guitars sound excruciatingly weak and a very fuzzed out, there’s no power behind them and they easily begin to grate on the nerves. The melodies themselves are irritating, being far too cheesy and bright for their own good. The whole album just reeks of desperation,
Hypomanie seem so content to create the most obnoxiously harmless and least threatening form of post rock imaginable that all knowledge of how to actually write good music gets thrown out of the windows.
Really, it’s hard to describe just how bland empty this record actually is. None of the melodies really go anywhere; the droning melodies that I assume were meant to create an atmospheric wall of sound are weak and uninspired. There’s no real atmosphere in here, no power, nothing to keep it interesting. It’s an ultimately shallow and one dimensional album that is far more concerned with sounding pretty than with having any weight behind the compositions. It’s a shame really;
A City in Mono was an incredibly good album that mixed post rock and shoegaze with a little black metal. The result was an album that was incredibly enjoyable and suitably atmospheric. This album on the other hand just destroyed any potential that
A City in Mono established for this band.
I could tell from the first track that this was going to be a disappointing album and nothing proves me otherwise. Right from the get go we’re presented with highly generic melodies and predictable song patterns. I highly doubt that there was much thought put into the actual writing of this album as much of it seems directly ripped off from
Godspeed.
Hypomanie doesn’t challenge the boundaries of post rock, doesn’t bring any new ideas to the table and create an album that is the very definition of generic post rock. The only difference between this and plenty of other post rock albums is that the sound quality is incredibly poor. Really, this is some of the worst production values I’ve heard in a while. There’s simply no reason for the guitar tone to be that bad. Overall this is an incredibly weak album from a band that had a lot of potential. Do yourself a favour and pick up the previous album and give this one a miss, I guarantee you won’t be missing out on anything.
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