Skipping The Surface

POZ Review: Caspian - Waking Season

We as writers and music fans sometimes sleep on bands. Sometimes they’re not on a label that we regularly keep an eye on. Sometimes we’re so enthralled in other projects that we just plain skip over the brilliance of something that exists. Caspian is that band that I feel I’ve slept on in the last couple of years. After moving through the motions and movements spread across Waking Season, they will forever hold my attention from this day forward. This band shouldn’t be opening small club tours. They need to be scoring Academy Award winning films.

At the midpoint of Waking Season sits “High Lonesome,” a three minute plus distant awe of sorts, separating the first half of the album’s bright presence with the second half’s invigorating, fighting and triumphant end. As the title track and “Porcellous” open up the character traits of the album, “Long the Desert Mile” and the thunderous closing “Fire Made Flesh” show how intense Caspian are willing to push their music’s overall aura. Not only does each individual song on Waking Season bloom gradual, beautiful arcs of vibrant colors that release in bold confidence, but the album as a whole moves in a cinematic beginning to end.

There are minor elements within the songs as well as the transitions in between them that keep you enthralled in the journey. There’s the abrupt ending to the opener, the rise and fall of the ten minute “Gone in Bloom and Bough” that is fit for a an EP single itself and the high pitch squeals that shift from noise to harmony at the beginning of “Halls of Summer.” When being uplifted by “Hickory ‘54,” you immediately want to call everyone you love and tell them how much they mean to you. Caspian transcend the norms of post-rock greatness on their latest album, and move into orchestral movement worthy of the anguish, hope, confusion and understanding found in Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai records.

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