From their onset, the Brighton-based Esben and the Witch have excelled at the aesthetic component of recent goth-leaning music. Of the many emerging dark, female-fronted acts, they've got some of the slickest packaging, complete with a name derived from a grisly Danish fairy tale and a list of "Band Interests" on Facebook that concludes with, "Victoriana, Romance, Ghosts." The follow-up to their debut full-length, Violet Cries-- a new EP called Hexagons-- takes their curative framework a step further-- it's a concept piece made up of six Roman-numerically ordered "Hexagons" with dramatic parentheticals: "Hexagons I (The Fall)", "Hexagons II (The Flight)", et cetera. Its release also coincided with a week-long webcast event called "Hexagons Cinema", in which the band streamed a series of footage shot in the UK's oldest functioning cinema. At the very least, Esben have shown themselves fine scholars of textbook aspects of spook. But much like on Violet Cries, all of Hexagons' thoughtful ornamentation only emphasizes how frustratingly plotless the songs are.
These songs are sparer than much of the material from Violet Cries, often centered around dramatic piano lines and bare acoustic guitar sheathed in haunting echoes. The bookending tracks, "Hexagons I (The Fall)" and "Hexagons VI (The Thaw)", aren't even so much songs as they are brief, ambient reminders of the grim mood the trio wants you to experience but seems incapable of fleshing out. By comparison, "Hexagons II (The Flight)" and "Hexagons III (The Surge)" sound tightly structured and concussive. But they still fall flat: The latter, for instance, hints at the band's promising post-rock tendencies by building a thick, apocalyptic guitar line, but before it's allowed to peak and crash, it peters out and devolves into more thin, aimless piano. None of these cuts reach the guttural fullness of Violet Cries cuts "Marching Song" or "Warpath", two strong tracks that probably should have been used as templates for Esben's future recordings. Instead, they instilled listeners with what now feels like false hope. In the absence of compelling cores, these songs are carried, sometimes solely, by frontwoman Rachel Davies' strong and brooding British-accented vocals.
Hexagons also emphasizes the extent to which the indiesphere wants to embrace a goth revival in the wake of the success of artists like Zola Jesus, and it highlights an experimental phase that can easily misfire. There's a sense here that these dark waters are being tested unsuccessfully, explored using well-crafted embellishments without the raw songwriting materials needed to deliver on their promise.
