Snowdrift hail from Seattle. You'd never know it, and I mean that without a trace of irony. Their sound is much in the post-rock vein, but benefits from vocals. Curiously operatic and strangely moving vocals, at that: described by another zine as 'a mix between Stevie Nicks and Karen O,' Kat Terran brings haunting atmosphere and melody to an already textured sound to great effect, setting Snowdrift apart from their peers by some distance.
There's a moment just short of two minutes into opening track 'Secret' that a delicate and lonely-sounding guitar produces a half a bar that sounds like it's lifted from Hotel California' by The Eagles. I don't know why, but I rather like it. Perhaps it's because it sounds incongruous, yet simultaneously fitting, emerging as it does from the wash of delicately chiming guitars that mist together to create a soft backdrop to the lost, mournful-sounding vocals, that are eventually buried not in a snowdrift, but a crescendo of guitars and muffled drums in that is an enticing and promising start to the album.
Of course, the problem with ethereal post-rock albums is that they all too often fall into predictable troughs of sameness, and so it's genuinely refreshing to find in 'Starry All Over' an album that strays from the path in a number of interesting ways, from the slow and unsettling avant-garde electronic experimentalism of 'Little Roar' and the spaced-out semi-ambient prog of 'Sugar Queen and the Honey Storm' to the almost jazz-tinged sparseness of 'Those Nights' and the semi-ambient rumblings of 'Disaster as a Swan.'
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Swirls of atonal guitar provide the backdrop to the mesmerising and darkly seductive 'Howl Snow' and it isn't the only track to remind me of some of the Pain Teens' darker moments, a brooding cacophony of sound of indeterminate origin enveloping and almost burying the fragile vocals. It contrasts remarkably with the timpani and glockenspiel led 'Sky Scrape Sea' that sits somewhere between Cranes and Jarboe. Deep, mystical and compelling, it's truly captivating.
This isn't an album that boasts a great many hooks or choruses - there is none I can discern - it more than compensates in its magnificent atmosphere that's organic and almost indefinable in its quality.
http://www.myspace.com/snowdrift
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