The tenets of pop and post-rock are about as far apart as possible. The former channels its energy through concrete structural cells to produce a sort of lucid pleasure; the latter-- although now ossified enough for its maneuvers to be as familiar as pop-- deranges this linear passage with a variety of skew-angled, semi-permeable membranes to produce cognitive dissonance. Pop songwriting often emphasizes singing as an aesthetic center; post-rock is often instrumental, or burdened with vocals so monochromatic and faceless as to be inconsequential. Pop is warm, utopian, and emotional; post-rock is cold, dystopian, and cerebral.
Despite these tensions, Patrick Phelan's third LP manages to believably reconcile the two genres. With its dirge-heavy and lugubrious shimmer, Cost's slinky post-rock is, in part, completely textbook. The album opens with the instrumental "In Words", where great slabs of bass plot vertices on an expansive graph of quivering ambiance; its sloughs and peaks are pretty but don't distinguish Phelan from the post-rock pack. The same holds true for all of the instrumentals, which are usually fairly brief interludes: "In View" lets its delicate scraps of acoustic guitar drift through a gusty tunnel, and "We Forgive Our Own" barely hints at structure with a smattering of percussive plinks.
But "Favor", one of the non-instrumental songs that comprise the bulk of the album, does distinguish Phelan from other rock bands who've added laptops to their live arsenal: Its fleet bassline, insistent percussion, and crystalline guitar unfurl in orderly rank and file, intermittently gussied up with a rock crunch that amplifies the song's forward momentum. Phelan gives no quarter to superfluous vocals or disorganized arrangements. He lays out his quietly dissonant melodies in transparent, sequential lines, and his vocals-- stoically emotive and unapologetically human-- become the centerpiece of any song they inhabit. Phelan's voice scuds across the slate-grey sky of "Ruin" like a thundercloud, overshadowing the spare track instead of blurring into it. As "Settlements" see-saws between electro-acoustic atmosphere and pyrotechnic sparks, it evokes a Brit-pop Mogwai; the sinuous and chiming torch song "Sails Descending" sounds like Elliot Smith singing for Bark Psychosis. Elegant and understated but not obtusely obscure, Cost locates the humanity in a genre that tacitly seems more interested in apocalyptic wastelands and extreme post-human futures.
