Review Summary: An elegy in motion, Corpse Lights illuminates grief with haunting beauty.
From the depths of the cavernous and often solitary domain of post rock-where crescendos echo off walls of noise like choirs, BARRENS’ Corpse Lights arrives not as a blinding flare but as a cold, flickering signal in the dark. It’s a record about absence, grief, and dim, lingering presence of what was. And in its careful articulation of atmosphere and restraint, it doesn’t just solidify BARRENS’ position as a serious rising name within the genre-it questions what post-rock is still capable of expressing.
The album’s title, Corpse Lights, references the folkloric phenomena of mysterious lights over graves or marshes interpreted as symbols of death or lingering spirits. That duality of beauty and dread, illumination and loss shines throughout the music. Tracks like Memory Eraser and The Derelict don't charge forward with dramatic flair; they surface slowly, cautiously, like a rolling fog becoming denser by the second. The album thrives in this ambiguous zone, inviting the listener to sit in moments that feel heavy yet appear weightless.
These thematic undercurrents are not merely atmospheric. They shape the structure of the songs themselves. Sorrowed embodies the idea of carrying grief with a kind of quiet dignity. Rather than reaching for triumphant catharsis, the track wanders in a lethargic spiral, where distortion and melody seem to coexist on fragile terms. Even the astral named interludes, Periastron and Apastron, imbue a gravitational pull between one extreme and the other- presence and distance, comfort and distress, more and less.
Since its rise in the late '90s, post-rock has often teetered between brilliance and becoming a caricature of itself due to its heavy reliance on atmospheric builds, delayed gratification, and emotional maximalism sometimes becoming a little too predictable and formulaic. Admittedly, BARRENS do tread a fine line on Corpse Lights as they work within that familiar architecture but take care not to lean too heavily on it. While BARRENS excel at cultivating mood, the pacing across the album can feel languid to a fault. Several tracks- particularly The Hull and Apastron- drift for minutes in sonic territory that feels too safe, even interchangeable. What begins as contemplative can risk becoming inert. Likewise, the tonal palette across the record- while cohesive- offers little surprise. Reverb-soaked guitars, airy synths, and glacial drums recur across nearly every track, and while expertly mixed, the uniformity of texture becomes a limitation.
Corpse Lights remains rooted in post-rock’s safest dialect. In a landscape where contemporaries like Holy Fawn or A.A. Williams are blurring genre lines with metal, shoegaze, or folk elements, BARRENS play it relatively straight. Yes, the album’s textures blur and at times, it could push harder against the genre’s boundaries however these aren’t failures. They’re limitations that reflect an incredibly competent band on the rise. There’s a quiet conservatism beneath the ambiance: this is post-rock done very well, but rarely daringly.
