Listening to the Toronto band’s new album, I wished upon myself an experiment: What if I heard one of these tracks without knowing it was Do Make Say Think? I’m sure “Horripilation,” at more than ten minutes long with its braided guitars and dual drums, would have given the band away immediately. But other songs would have kept their secret, and so there is much newness in which to revel on Stubborn Persistent Illusions, the band’s first album since 2009’s Other Truths, which will sound both familiar and peculiar to anyone who has spent time with their previous music.
Even the most arcane genres have tropes, and post-rock has built up plenty of its own. The most well-defined and obvious are often derided (or celebrated) as “crescendocore,” a self-explanatory tag that doesn’t quite pin down a group like Do Make Say Think. Yes, they are often building up to something in their songs, but not always in volume or drama. The group, who shares members with the recently revived Toronto indie outfit Broken Social Scene, has the well-oiled sound of a band in its third decade, a chemistry required to compose such experimental rock and make it sound natural instead of regimented. They don’t always sound tight, but they never sound apart.
Stubborn Persistent Illusions has the immediate trappings of a Do Make Say Think record. “War on Torpor,” which is unusually charged up from its first moments, can feel like it’s spinning in place as a result. “Horripilation” might be immediately identifiable as a DMST song—the clean, almost bumbling guitar riffs have a delicate sturdiness in their repetition—but as it winds around in minutes-long sections, the group uncovers new wrinkles in their sound. Two minutes in, a snare drum sounds downright funky all alone like that, and a few minutes later, a bass drum marches into a gallop. It’s not just that it sounds like a Do Make Say Think recording, it covers distance like one, a marathon approach: themes are repeated like track workout sets, interludes play out like lazy jogs, the home stretch feels like an accomplished return.
At their core, DMST are a guitars and drums group—two of each—but they’ve often let other instruments perform the cinematic lifts of their mid-song interludes. A couple minutes into “Her Eyes on the Horizon,” the horns take over entirely, slowing things to a creak so that the band can rebirth the original theme on a refreshed, sanctified canvas. In this way, Do Make Say Think’s songs don’t demand attention so much as reward it. The album is easy to let play through, but sometimes hard to feel intimate with its complexity. It makes for music that’s wonderful to live with, encouraging repetition while allowing for unconcentrated listening.
Like most post-rock outfits, DMST invest heavily in timbre—their guitars variously ring, buzz, shudder, and twinkle—but they rarely let things get atmospheric, instead grounding their music in weaving, persistent riffs. The album’s frantic centerpiece, “And Boundless,” is propped up by a misdirecting set-up track called “Bound.” The first song builds and collapses a twinkling surge, but it doesn’t pay off in the way most DMST pieces do. “And Boundless” is a relentless and unnerving march by comparison, built on imposing, siren-like guitar strums and crashing drums, this from a band frequently and accurately pegged as pastoral. Even at their loudest, DMST are never rollicking or spinning out of control; here they’ve harnessed and reigned in one of their most nerve-wracking works into an opus that winds around like a top prowling around a table.
Elsewhere, “As Far As the Eye Can See” finds the band at their calmest, playing grazing tunes built around the type of filigree guitar-riffs-as-theme they’ve made into a hallmark. It’s an effect that produces an internal logic, in which a song can feel like an island with its own ecosystem, and an album an archipelago. It’s challenging to find your way inside. In the oscillation from serenity to cinematic triumph, their music can seep into your conscious and float around your daily life, not so much a soundtrack as a pliable accompaniment. Even when it’s not competing for your attention, Stubborn Persistent Illusions feels impossible to put down.
