The celebrated work of post-rock pioneers like Don Caballero or Tortoise carried with it some baggage, specifically, the impression that bands who focused on odd time signatures and jazzy improvisation didn't care about emotional communication. This characterization has never been entirely accurate-- the best of these bands had plenty of impressionistically emotional music that swelled with grandeur-- but much of math/post-rock was intended to be expansive and dense, and, as a result, became pretty inscrutable on a smaller, more personal level.
Over the past few years, the instrumental virtuosity and compositional complexity of math-rock has become a jumping off point for exploring a host of influences, like Battles' experimental, eclectic dance music or Tera Melos’ knotty interpretation of punk pop. Bassist Greg Albert, guitarist/lead singer Sam Owens, and drummer Max Almario of Brooklyn-based Celestial Shore put their own spin on this idea, taking the wide-eyed pop psychedelia of the Zombies and schoolyard weirdness of the Unicorns and running them through the filter of their jazz-rock backgrounds.
It’s telling that they stumbled on their sound while learning to play the entirety of Odessey and Oracle in their practice space before the band even had a name, eventually incorporating gold-plated vocal interplay, pop harmonies, and tightly wound bursts of wiry guitar work into their debut 2011 EP California. The EP also showed off the trio’s ability to write quietly personal songs surrounded by the chaos of their kitchen sink compositions, allowing the more sprawling, complicated aspects of their sound to inform, rather than overwhelm, a delightfully off kilter brand of nervy, emotional indie rock.
For their first full-length release, 10x, Celestial Shore have crafted an album that’s almost defiantly misshapen in spite of its pop ambitions, moving away from the cleaner melodies of their first EP to occasionally get lost in a thicker web labyrinthe guitar figures and tricky rhythms. The result is an uneven record that takes one too many left turns while searching for interesting ways to communicate a confused, emotional discontent.
The album's first two songs highlight the ebb and flow of 10x. The halting, jumbled, herky-jerky flow of “Stairs Under Stars” practically begins in media res, immediately tossing the listener into a thrashing sea of competing instrumentation and fragmented lyrics. And when the 10x apex “Valerie” follows the delirious tantrum of “Stars”, it’s an immediate palate cleanser, a fantastic example of the ways in which Celestial Shore’s mathy flourishes can underline and enhance their nuanced songwriting, using musical form to illustrate the jittery, anxious, and jealous emotional tremors that come from a gradually dying romantic flame. The album's other highlight is the odd gallop of "Hours Minute", a song that pushes more of the Zombies' garage psych influence to the forefront.
The remainder of 10x gets too mired in the group's tendency to lean on anarchic fits of messy noodling ("Rabbit Hole," the Empress Of-assisted "Sleep," ) that whip and turn but ultimately come over as navel-gazing and indulgent. When Celestial Shore use the foundation of mathy song structures and instrumentation to build strangely personal pieces of rough-edged art pop, 10x becomes a gorgeous jewel of a record. When they lean on meandering, jammy compositions too busy to breathe, the Brooklyn trio falls prey to the indulgent tendencies that have marred math/post-rock musicians for years.
