Oh Hiroshima - Oscillation

I came across Oh Hiroshima a year or so ago; it was a brief encounter and one that didn’t lure me into much revisiting. I had heard of them via the acclaim I had seen for their 2015 album In Silence We Yearn, which I was relatively disappointed to find to conform so closely to the caricature of what post-rock’s critics lament about the genre’s current staleness. When I saw their new album here receiving a fair bit of hype for the immersiveness of its experience, I figured I’d give In Silence We Yearn another round both in preparation for this album and to see if I was missing something from that first run through. And honestly, I was disappointed to have gone in twice in search of some post-rock mastery amid a donation bag of the genre’s typicalities. Oscillation, unfortunately, is hardly any different. There is perhaps a bit more guitar/bass oomph from time to time a la Russian Circles, but most of the album blends right in with the crop of post-rock of the past several years, relying on the same ambient reverb-y guitar echoes and contrived builds to soulless crescendos that haven’t worked for them or their contemporaries as of late. Oscillation sounds like a product of convergent evolution toward the painted-into-a-corner dullness of late-phase Explosions in the Sky albums that come nowhere close to the catharsis of the album (The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place) that put them and second-wave post-rock on the map. The swelling strings and the sweeping guitar chord progressions over the ethereal vocals during the climax of “In Solar” are probably the only time this album somewhat overcomes the lull of its derivativeness to tap into a little bit of what made post-rock so emotive in the golden years of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Explosions in the Sky. But alas, Oscillation for the vast majority of its runtime falls victim to the same loss for ideas and formulaic trappings that have ensnared Oh Hiroshima and their contemporaries for the better part of this decade, and it’s not at all indicative of any kind of progression to a breakthrough to the new creative wellspring that bands in this field have been desperately searching for.

The average of whatever you’d give the past three Explosions albums and that shitty new Godspeed album/10