Score: 6/10
Not to Reason Why hail from California. Now, please resist the urge to yell “Caaaallliforniaaa” (a la The O.C) as they are not from the Orange County (home of perfect tans and apparently, rich teenagers handy with guns who seem to love mopey Imogen Heap tunes), they are actually based in Petaluma. Now that we have that pop culture reference out of the way, I can tell you all about their EP, Who Wants Flowers When They’re Dead?. A rather ambiguous title (do they mean dead flowers or dead folks?) fitting for a band that consciously genre hop and would definitely not cause Ryan and Seth to get their groove on.
The group seem to be fond of clear cut timing, but instead of taking the usual Don Caballero/Battles route and channeling this into a creation of math-rock intensity, they slow things down and instead create an EP that effortlessly weaves between instruments and styles. Ample examples of this are the tracks “Mightiest Monster In All Creation Ravaging A Universe For Love” and “1.21 JiggaWatts!?” with the latter including pulsing melodic piano repetition which provides the backdrop for Explosions in The Sky-esque guitar reverb. Although this EP does draw upon the staples of instrumental rock, it also packs in plenty of unique moments, such as the rather ineffable (basically, problematic for me to describe) drums that crash and soar throughout the record; in short, the percussion is along the lines of the drumming of Hangedup, if it were a little bassier and less claustrophobic.
Moving between moments of ambience and clattering reverb-heavy climaxes, the quartet have created an EP that packs quite a punch. With six tracks totaling in at 30 minutes in total, the EP contains fair amount of material to work through, and although a sizable portion of it seems to be a nod to the usual names within instrumental music, there is enough here to suggest that Not to Reason Why may provide us with something more imaginative next time around.
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