Review Summary: Virginian post-rockers claim the throne with their "better half"
At the dusk of 90's, and while most of today's famous post rockers were still unknown and drifting, Labradford were slowly mastering the art of creating music in low frequencies. Shaping their sound for almost half a decade, the band managed to effectively built a name in the fledgling back then post rock community, for its magnificent sense of creating atmospheres of sheer ambiance.
Mi Media Naranja is an album of this quality, haunting and silent, completely devoid of climaxes, and deeply evocative.
While rich in textures and layers of sound,
Mi Media Naranja is not the complex, hard-to-swallow instrumental record. Relaxing in its entirety, but still dramatic and intense at times, the album flows with exceptional ease, being able to maintain a moody character from the beginning to the end. Mostly built on smooth piano and guitar melodies, with many twinkling and echoing sounds at the background,
Mi Media Naranja's emotional spectrum depends on the ambiance it creates, starting from dreamy to almost claustrophobic and dreadful. The sonic experience is enhanced with gentle string additions and carpets of ever-flowing keyboard sounds, accompanying with an underwhelming melancholy the developing themes, mostly far from the typical post rock, crescendo-craving structures. Away from complexity in songwriting and instrumentation,
Mi Media Naranja's minimalism and simplicity is clearly a mean to the construction of a sonic creation, that, despite flirting with an -excusable- monotony at times, remains seethingly attractive and beautifully mysterious.
