Since I became mates with Ensuing Silence from the tastefully decorated corner of MySpace, I have eagerly awaited the arrival of their 5 track EP 'Entropy' and it's here at last... the postman had to trech through at least eight inches of snow to get the package to the door... which reminds me... I really must get that sidewalk cleared!
So... out of the package comes the delightful EP and accompanying 'ES' Press Kit ... they guys have done a great job in their CD design and in accumulating enough interesting bio information to make me wanna hear the music even more!
Handlebars is the one that wakes you up to the excellence that Ensuing Silence have placed their own trade mark upon. Here we have some clever ear-tantalizing rock arrangements with some truly thought-jolting musicianship. The vocals are excellent for their shameless range and proficiency as well as for their lyric stressing delivery. Harmonies are absolutely superb and the production job... seamlessly enthralling me dears! Keep your eye out for the 2.47 moment when things go spiraling into the distance taking your unabandoned enthrallment with them!
Thorn in my side takes the entire contemporary rock horizon slams it into alt pop and drags it through 50 years of maple and rosewood neck fretwork leaving sparkles and traces of magnificence to keep the ears overjoyed! What more can I say except that the arrangements, engineering, and production work add the gloss to where the matt emulsion once draped the Canadian music industry dull for so long! Move over knights of the recent past.. Ensuing Silence just cut an audiophile's highway through the Rockies and across the ocean!!
Believe it is another laughingly brilliant piece of work from Lee, Chris, and Bob... lyrics are superb but that incredible guitar work that surfaces around the 2.40 mark... oh deary deary me! Drums and bass need a mention here (as well as everywhere else) for being impossibly tight and cleverly crafted... it takes real perception of your craft to get it this right! Vocals and harmonies of course take some kind of delight in being top notch but the real prize, again, is the intricate songwriting and production work... what a very smart group of boys you are!
Never has to be the more classic, more metal, more grunge on the strings front but the vocals take the edge and bend some kind of smoothness into the whole affair! Ensuing Silence just made it to my favourite Canadian Rock band of the moment simply by being different, by being unconventional, by being 'them!' Watch out for the brilliantly progressive arrangement that deserves a few listens for your heart and soul to finally accept the evidence in what these guys have accomplished!
Dark Crawl has one of the best drum/percussion openings I have heard in modern rock in many many years! Lovely guitar inserts meander helplessly over some fine bass work as the drums pick up a more intense pace in an effort to straddle the guitar chords slamming the speaker cones. I love the songwriting... there's nothing but uniqueness in the writer/composer's approach and I have to say any other vocal would not have worked as well as this one does here in it's job of making sure the words are expressed effectively! A truly brilliant piece of music and skilled musicianship make this one hell of a classic all to itself!
I wish this wasn't a 5 track EP and that it was a full album! I wish I'd been in the studio to witness the looks of disbelief when they played back the final mixdown and I wish Ensuing Silence every best wish towards their unavoidable success in Canada and the rest of the planet. I also wish you'd have the sense to go and buy anything related to these guys and their forward thinking innovative music ASAP!
