The Program:
Path of Least Resistance:
Bandcamp:
DD/CD:
Out Now:
★★★★★★★½☆☆☆
Some twenty years ago, a young Leeds outfit called Pale Saints were causing minor palpitations amongst indie kids with their beautiful edgy pastoral releases via 4AD. After a handful of imaginative singles and even better E.P.s, the band called it a day in the mid '90s after nearly a decade.
Fast forward to 2015 and co-founders Chris Cooper and Graeme Naysmith, the engine-room of their former band, have regrouped as The Program and have been busying crafting an album of atmospheric post-rock that extends well beyond its genre's tight little boundaries. Path of Least Resistance starts in straight-forward fashion with Why?, a moody track with some feedback, a middle-Eastern air and some not-too-atypical Saints-like drumming, followed by the celestial Xmod, a track that 'out-Mogwais' Mogwai themselves.
Things begin to stretch out from Doppelganger onwards - a hypnotic psychedelic Floyd-like drug-rocker that recalls Eat Lights Become Lights in slumber - with samples, heavier riffs and out-and-out otherworldly euphoria with differentials - Lonar and Glissamb might at first sound vastly different, one being heads-down no-nonsense hair-swishing indie-rock, the other sounding like Steve Hillage on hookah, but they're cast from the same mould of intelligent space-rock.
Across an entire album, this could have imploded in the wrong hands - Cooper and Naysmith have ensured it hasn't by taking their time and aligning their like-minded work ethic triumphantly.
Path of Least Resistance:
Bandcamp:
DD/CD:
Out Now:
★★★★★★★½☆☆☆
Fast forward to 2015 and co-founders Chris Cooper and Graeme Naysmith, the engine-room of their former band, have regrouped as The Program and have been busying crafting an album of atmospheric post-rock that extends well beyond its genre's tight little boundaries. Path of Least Resistance starts in straight-forward fashion with Why?, a moody track with some feedback, a middle-Eastern air and some not-too-atypical Saints-like drumming, followed by the celestial Xmod, a track that 'out-Mogwais' Mogwai themselves.
Things begin to stretch out from Doppelganger onwards - a hypnotic psychedelic Floyd-like drug-rocker that recalls Eat Lights Become Lights in slumber - with samples, heavier riffs and out-and-out otherworldly euphoria with differentials - Lonar and Glissamb might at first sound vastly different, one being heads-down no-nonsense hair-swishing indie-rock, the other sounding like Steve Hillage on hookah, but they're cast from the same mould of intelligent space-rock.
Across an entire album, this could have imploded in the wrong hands - Cooper and Naysmith have ensured it hasn't by taking their time and aligning their like-minded work ethic triumphantly.