Field Recordings

Not to be confused with any of Alan Lomax's tirelessly compiled field recordings from the first half of the 20th century, British post-rockers Reynolds mix experimental instrumentals with shifting post-punk dynamics to create a fairly standard final product. With winding guitar lines forming the foundation for improvisational meandering, the songs bend and weave through various progressions but generally return to their introductory riffs. And while the songs do feature vocals of some sort, the production doesn't really allow for the listener to decipher them past simply knowing that they are buried somewhere in the mix. Lurching into a fury of fuzzy guitar crunch, the band steps up the intensity a few notches but doesn't make an appreciable improvement in the occasionally ordinary mood of the album. All in all, the elements present in Reynolds's musical vocabulary could yet yield a winning formula, but here the results place them as a somewhat lesser variation of bands in the Modest Mouse or Nation of Ulysses tradition.