Zebulon Pike-Intransience

Unfortunate
2008

When I was in college there was this one building with a long winding staircase in the middle of the room. I never got tired of going up that staircase because of it's unique structure and you could stop halfway up and be rewarded by viewing the building from an angle that a more traditional staircase would not have been able to provide. Minneapolis based instrumental band Zebulon Pike brought to my mind memories of that staircase as I absorbed the three tracks that comprise their third album "Intransience". They have folded in aspects of heavy fuzzed out doom, stark bursts of progressive rock as well as pieces of just classic style metal, avant garde and other forms. The results are quite phenomenal as they work like architects with unlimited resources in constructing the three tracks presented here. Zebulon Pike have the technical ability to easily push and pull the music to and fro and keep everything winding and flowing through moody plus even explosive passages. However despite the obvious talent they never get bogged down by trying to be showy or attempting to squeeze in too much. This is the kind of album where about two minutes into the opener "Mirrors of blessed miracles" I just leaned my body back into the chair, closed my eyes and let the heavy yet soothing sounds just envelop me. It only got better from there as they seamlessly shifted around bringing so many pulses and bursts of heavy and emotionally charged moments that all manage to form a whole like a juggler easily keeping three very different items constantly going at the same time. Zebulon Pike's greatest feat here might just be that they are deceptively complicated because although they lure you in with some basic parts they quickly know when to start maneuvering the music. You become so focused on each individual movement that sometimes it's easy to forget all that they are doing. So when you step back and take in the album as a whole then you realize that it's even spectacular then it at first appeared.

http://www.myspace.com/zebpike