Continental What Was Gained from What Was Lost

[U-Dot; 2005]

Styles: oooog, mmmmph, urrrrrgh, it’s all … post-rock-y rock-y
Others: This Is A Process Of A Still Life, Joy Wants Eternity, My Dad Vs Yours


First off, I must warn you, gentle reader, that this is yet another post-rock pan-job. Maybe it's the explosion of the genre; maybe it's the annoying hype; maybe that yak's head stew I had for supper is turning around in my tub like a devilish foetus, but so many of these albums are failing in so many ways, failing to create even a trickle in the river run.

A below-average record, What Was Gained from What Was Lost registers on a completely different modicum than the last Continental effort, Four-Letter Words; but both albums employ similar strategies to get listeners swaying. It's all about texture -- the guitars interweave simple patterns back and forth while the milquetoast drums 'n' bass exist just long enough to make one burp out a fell yawn without even knowing it.

But what's this? Vocals? Awww dude, gay! Mhmmmmm... no, this isn't working at all. Shit, those awful vocals ruined the latest Silver Mt. Zion long player. The grating singing on "August Ends," thankfully, is anomalous to the rest of the record. What we're presented instead is the sort of Tristeza-leaning instrumental stuff that tickled my fancy a lot more a few years ago.

What Was Gained doesn't inspire any concrete reaction. It's like watching a minor-league baseball game: you can get drunk along with it and hoot 'n' holla and paint yer chest like a Rikers-Island dill, but you'd definitely rather be watching the big-league chews popping their gum bubbles. In fact, I'm gonna throw the year's best post-rock album, A Colores (or maybe Rock Action or Lift Your Skinny Fists...), into my player and likely never listen to this again.

Whether my lukewarm feelings toward What Was Gained are due to my weariness of middling, noodling, doggy-paddling post-post-rock bands I can't say for sure, but Four-Letter Words and Continental's self-titled debut definitely packed more of a punch. Not-so-ironically, the tracks I enjoy most from WWGFWWL (the infectious "No Shorty", the spectacular "I and I Midnight Rendevous") are more like F-LW b-sides than exciting new movements. A disappointment, this record was -- as Yoda might say -- but things do perk up a tad once the first few songs are a quickly forgotten memory. Oh, and incidentally, did you notice that Yoda was overly stoic in the new films? All rubbery, bland, and too concerned with making his communication complicated, sorta like this reviewer AND this band! Hey, I managed to slip that in there and relate it back to the album at hand. Shit, I can't see real good; is that a Pulitzer in my future? Methinks, yes.

1. Sown
2. August Ends
3. Ghost War
4. Light Out
5. No Shorty
6. I and I Midnight Rendesvous
7. Pillow Talk

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