Denver-based post-rock duo the
Very Hush Hush make their full-length debut (following three increasingly complex EPs) with 2006's
Mourir C'est Facile, an epic-scaled album triangulated somewhere between
Swervedriver-style shoegazing, the mammoth art-noise of
Godspeed You Black Emperor!, and the chilly distancing effects of
Radiohead. The album is best heard as a whole: when the songs are heard individually, the band's antecedents loom a little too large, but over the course of the album as a whole, the sense that multi-instrumentalists Peter Rappmund and Grant Outerbridge are merely talented mimics is blunted by their canny sense of arrangement and dynamics. Some tricks are used a few too many times -- nearly all of Rappmund's vocals are so heavily processed that it sounds like he's singing through a CB radio during a thunderstorm -- but the duo ring enough changes on their basic stand-offish art-rock template to make
Mourir C'est Facile intriguing rather than merely opaque and abstract. Furthermore, the sudden appearance of a crunchy little three-minute pop song like "Every Little" from underneath the sheets of distortion and drones just makes the listener pay closer attention to reveal all the half-hidden hooks sprinkled throughout these ten lengthy songs. ~ Stewart Mason