West of Corey raise a very interesting point on their latest single. Can you be epic without being loud? Well, let’s see. Too many bands, especially of the rock persuasion equate loudness with effectiveness, as if the louder, more technical, more amped up, the more multi-tracked a band is, the more they will get noticed. Indeed West of Corey’s last release, Misty Mound, might suggest that they too think that way, it being a boisterous piece of groovesome bluesy infused rock. But Course of Things to Come shows them in a different, more thoughtful, light.
This new single is sweeping and dramatic, sounding like the score to the latest fantasy blockbuster movie, but it manages to create all of that from very little actual sonic weight. Bass lines mesh with a minimal beat and peripheral instrumentation help colour the middle ground but it is the vocals which create the feel of the piece. Wandering from intimate to soaring and back again, they build a sort of vocal architecture, normally the job of the guitar riff or melody, but do so in such a way that the result is sky-scraping yet somehow translucent. Like a cathedral made of glass…if that doesn’t sound too pretentious. A surprising track which shows that there is more to West of Corey than first meets the eye…I mean ear!
So to answer the initial question – Can you be epic without being loud? As it turns out yes…you most certainly can.
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[…] West of Corey is very good at making very poignant statements to go along with their very accessible music. Usually, the smarter lyrical content of the music world seems to go hand in hand with over the top music, the sort of thing that gets called progressive by people like me who write this sort of thing for a living. […]