Inertia –  We Are Parasols (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

If someone like Nick Cave best typifies the dark, sweeping and majestic end point of the western blues derived musical experiment; this is the flipside of that coin. Portland/Atlanta trio, We Are Parasols, makes music which comes from a younger, though similarly angst ridden, oddly sultry and intense place, but one that has evolved out of the possibilities afforded by more recent technologies and more likely to tip its hat to Krautrock pioneers and New Romantic non-conformists than the more traditional canon.

And whereas the likes of Cave and the dark hordes which imitate his moves often rely on angular collisions and jarring music to create their apocalyptic beauty, We Are Parasols are driven by a more simpatico heart, one that pulses with an industrial, sometimes motorik beat but one which is also swathed in sumptuous harmonies, delicate synth washes and distant chiming guitars. Even when they rough things up a bit on songs such as the slow building Scoptophilia or the explosive Recoil, their music seems to mesh into post-rock walls of sound and shoegazing, effect drenched noise cocoons, the overall effect crushing rather than cutting.

The music suggests something beyond human a sort of impossible blend of the primitive and ancient and the clinical and futuristic, a hybrid of animal and machine, primordial yet complex as eerie atmospherics and Stygian sounds vie for attention and the end result is a heavy, claustrophobic and nebulous musical collection.