A Burial At Sea – Close To Home | Album Review

Close To Home isn’t just the meaningless title of the this band’s new album. It’s a statement of fact, expressed with wistful whisper and strained shout within A Burial At Sea’s sentimental and bittersweet second record.

Originally hailing from across the Irish sea prior to settling in Liverpool, Close To Home is a record born forth from a period of deep reflection, mediation and longing. Here, within this deeply textured record, the post rock duo reflect upon their Gaelic heritage, the people and places who forged them as individuals and the eternal majesty of home through ephemeral dynamism. It’s a record of ache and bittersweetness, one articulated through swelling brass, metallic shoegaze, classic post-rock sensibilities and a record that stands as an album where one can faintly hear the faded Irish folklore whispering across the emerald sea. It’s also inevitably going to be one the best post rock releases of this year.

Opener and leading single ‘Párc Béal Uisce’ swiftly showcases such sensualities with grace, patience and heart-wrenching emotion. As the track ebbs and flows between tenderness and cresting half-time majesty, it’s impossible not to harken for a personal period of ones life lost to the annuals for time. As it, and the proceeding rugged nature of ‘Tor Head’ and the reverb drenched density of ‘Down To The Floor further attests to, this record see’s A Burial At Sea refining the patience that is inherent to genre in order to distill a sense of sentimentalism in it’s most potent form. Even with the record being mostly void of vocals, the fashion in which the duo articulate the convoluted human sensation of longing and bittersweetness surpasses the limited nature of language.

However, that’s not to say that Close To Home is a record purely focused on longing for times long gone. On certain tracks A Burial At Sea also masterfully portray the wholesome and giddy nature of a childhood well spent. The highly excitable natures of ‘Hy-Brasil’ and ‘Gorse Bush On Fire’ are wondrously euphoric and effortlessly channel that sense of playfulness that the majority of us have lost with settling into a tepid adulthood. As gorgeous brass takes centre stage and flirts the band’s more post-rock foundation within ‘Hy-Brasil’ and as the latter track demonstrates madcap riffery that’s on par with Scottish post rock heroes VASA and fellow native genre stalwarts And So I Watch You From Afar, it’s impossible not to reflect on one’s own halcyon days of youth. Frankly, it’s impossible not be infatuated with the free-spirited energy of these tracks.

Ultimately though, one of the most striking and alluring elements of this fantastic record is just how cinematic and relatable it is. Though such a sentiment may sound hyperbolic, Close To Home presents itself as the soundtrack to reflect upon one’s own ache as well as record that vividly portrays the environments and people that inspired it. It’s impossible not to envision the enterally enduring Northern Irish coastline when presented with the rocky yet majestic ‘Tor Head’ as much as it difficult not to envision one self looking upon a steely uncaring ocean – one that meets the grey skies of the horizon in uniform colour – when presented with the shoegazing anguish of ‘Masterfred’ or the storming hail of ‘Everything You Are Not’. Similarly, one would be hard-pressed not to reflect upon the people and places long condemned to time that have forged our own personal journey through life with perfect dichotomy between hope and pain present within the colossal closer of ‘DALL’.

Such is the beauty of this record. The creation of this record may have been a deeply intimate endeavour for the band, but here they are inviting us to it make it our own by projecting our own bittersweet tales onto it to make it a truly personal experience. The growth A Burial At Sea have demonstrated here when compared to their earlier material is staggering and the fashion in which the duo draw parallels between physical environments and one own’s tectonically shifting mind is second to none. Should one wish for a post rock journey that truly merits the grandiose expectations of this genre, then Close To Home is a must listen.