Review Summary: Battle of Mice and Jesu team up to bear down on your mind.
With the beginning is a picture:
http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/msnbc/Sections/TVNews/Dateline%20NBC/_Stories/2007/November/Patagonia/Picture%20109_edit.300w.jpg
This is essentially, the album. It's nature. It's the beauty of jagged mountain paths, and the rolling plains. Some music can become extremely polarizing to people, but much more beautiful to others. Bands can create epics, songs that break the 40 minute mark, and figure out who their fan base truly is. These songs can either wrap around a single idea and then expand on it, adding more and more layers to the first single idea, such as band like Godspeed You! Black Emperor would. Other bands will create long songs that constantly shift through tempos and time signatures, trying to make chaos reign for as long as they possibly can, such as band like Circle Takes The Square. Even though these two bands have extremely different approaches to music, there is one thing that they both have in common, beauty. Not everyone will see it, or maybe it's just a matter of opinion, but knee deep in it all, there is some beauty at the bottom of the coal mine.
Jesu side
The Jesu side is polarizing in it's own way that it follows the GY!BE idea of song writing. They start off with a simple idea, such as a simple guitar line, or a light keyboard, and then they expand on it. Further more adding drums, bass, vocals and a choir. When Jesu uses vocals though, they don't use them as the center of attention of sorts, but more of a way that a band like Sigur Ros utilizes vocals. They add them in, meshing them with the beauty that they create. These songs relax, unravel, take away the tension of your life. Sit with your eyes closed while listening to this side and just let your mind go crazy with the open, rolling plains. The flowers, the trees,
nature. Walk through and feel the breeze, as the piano whispers through the wind, delicately brushing your face as a calm gentle hand. Maybe you'd rather have a calm rain on a fall night. Sitting next to fire, watching your favorite movie, no, being with your favorite person, the true beauty and emotion for the one moment you love most. No foul temper or bad thought will come through your mind, because you will be at your peace, your zen, when the rolling notes of this side come crashing through.
Battle Of Mice side
The opposite of beauty, this side will deceive you at first. First with a gentle guitar and a rolling drum, backed by the beautiful side of Julie Christmas' voice, you may be expecting more of those calm, rolling hills. But, in mere seconds, an explosion of noise occurs. It's hectic, it grates through the sides. But it again stops, not with a calm noise, but with a synthesizer of ominous intentions. It's not long before that same gentle guitar line comes in with Julie's voice, yet again lulling you away from the hectic lifestyle it started out with. Julie's voice is the wind, it will either come along and gently brush your face, being an angel of sorts for your sonic journey, or she will be the cold winter breeze, scaring your face as you fight to find what he stops you from trying to see. The instruments will go either way as well, crafting a mountain landscape that either helps you over with an easy incline, or they create a jagged mountain pass, with incline's steeper than any foot could every try to go across. But alas, the first track features something no other track by Battle of Mice has, male vocals. In the last minute, a male vocal performance by Josh Graham (visual artist of
Neurosis) joins Julie, being the pounding to Julie's calm voice. It ends with a chilling cello.
Both bands approach a different side of beauty in music. Jesu covers your feet and weary eyes with the plains while Battle of Mice test your courage and bravery with the snowy mountain tops. It depends on how hard you look for the beauty. Whether it be in keyboards that trance you in a calm state, or keyboards that bear down on your mind, frightening you in what you may be most afraid of. In an effort to kill this word once and for all, it just matters how hard you search for the beauty in music, because at the end of your passage, it will lay there.
