God Is an Astronaut - Epitaph

Coming out of Ireland in the shadow of the Canadian post-rock scene in the early 2000’s, God Is an Astronaut have kept themselves going and their name out there and recognizable to those interested in the sound, though they never exactly penned a bonafide masterpiece like The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. The closest they came was probably with 2005’s All Is Violent, All Is Bright, but even that album still isn’t held to quite the same post-rock classic status as Explosions in the Sky’s and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s early work or Russian Circles’ consistently stellar output. Since then, the band’s albums have been a series of relatively trial-and-error stabs at the same post-rock form over and over again, and it’s made them a mostly boring and predictable band. But they have shown hints of excitement form time to time, and this new album, Epitaph, has a few highlights of its own, but not exactly enough to raise it high enough above the rest of their catalog.

The opening title track builds from a minimal, pensive piano melody into a sudden, fully post-metal explosion, soon expanded upon with melancholic, shoegaze-y guitars: nothing all that new for the sound or the band, but relatively well done. Still kind of sleepy and generic, but it gets the job done. The following song, “Mortal Coil”, keeps the metallic loudness pretty high and moves through a more interesting series of moods and musical motifs than the title track, somewhat reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The third track, “Winter Dusk / Awakening” returns to the more soothing, ambient side of God Is an Astronaut’s sound until its slow, mild crescendo at the very end, and it is indeed soothing. But for as long as it is and as early in the track listing as it is, it doesn’t feel like the most needed of breaks.

“Seance Room” follows with a quicker pace and a continuous heavy loudness, and while I enjoy the timbre of the abrasive sound they use to crank up the volume, the song still never quite accomplishes anything major musically, never really taking off from the lauch pad, stuck at ground level. “Komorebi” is another drowsy ambient lull, which sets a mood just fine, but does little else.

“Medea” starts with these eerie plinking sounds coming from behind the sustained ambient haze, and ascends to a more string-driven eerieness which I wish was just finished a little more dramatically and created a bolder mood after the opportunity given it by the introductory passage. “Oisín” ends the album on another return to the gentler side of things, and it’s not much to complain about or laud, but it does conclude the album with an overall feeling of having mostly gone in one ear and out the other.

Epitaph is an album that doesn’t really show all that much ambition and shows an image of God Is an Astronaut nice and cozy in their comfort zone. Unfortunately in the context outside their catalog, it’s a missed opportunity to set themselves apart from their fainting contemporaries and more of a reinforcement of the long lamented and begrudged expired status of their brand of post-rock.