Apse's 2006 debut, Spirit, recorded for the Spanish imprint Acuarela Discos and later reissued by ATP, found the Connecticut-based band making woozy space rock with a solid sense of ambience. It was classic post-rock, updated with a slight twist. In part because of the nod from ATP (who know a thing or two about forward-thinking musicians), the group looked at the time like possible successors to genre vets like Tortoise and Mogwai. Since then, Apse shed a few members and decamped to Cape Cod to record their latest, Climb Up-- a vast departure from Spirit that trades their debut's gloomy swirl for a more linear, prog-leaning take on chugging radio rock.
While I can certainly appreciate a band's desire to shake things up or approach its audience more directly, in this case the aesthetic shift doesn't seem to suit Apse's strengths. Their new formula, which puts a greater empasis on riffs and frontman Robert Toher's distracting vocal whine, swaps out the dreaminess of past recordings for something closer in style to the Mars Volta at their most straightforward, or more accurately, Muse. The ethereal qualities of Spirit have mostly gone missing, and with the exception of a few charming instrumental numbers (the pastoral psychedelia of "Tropica" and "In Gold"), Climb Up is filled with an odd (for indie listeners, at least) brand of stadium-sized rock that can't quite escape the notions of cheese and bloat that accompany that term.
Apse recorded the album themselves and do better with weight-- the sound is big and dense-- than they do economy. Climb Up's 12 tracks clock in at almost 60 minutes, and its individual pieces are stretched beyond their natural limits. That's particularly true on the slow-building numbers like "Lie", where Toher tests us, drawing each quavering vocal note out to several seconds over a plodding Dark Side of the Moon instrumental. Though a few winning songs are sprinkled throughout-- "3.1" nicely blends two sets of vocals over heavy stomps and chiming guitars-- even the faster-paced material here comes off as needling and overwrought. (Seemingly radio-ready prog-rock numbers "Rook", "The Age", and "The Whip" all suffer this fate.) By the time I get to the end of the record, which revs up the melody and swing too late, I'm spent. Toher goes on to claim on the final track "Closure" that he's "never had a party as cool as this one", and, man, I hope that's not true.
