Codes In The Clouds - As The Spirit Wanes

Ah when I was a young whipper snapper, fresh from my young and naive obsession with both horrendous metal and emo music, I became somewhat connected with I don't want to call it post-rock, so lets just call it instrumental music. Still to this day I have the likes of Explosions In The Sky, This Will Destroy You, Upcdownc, Mogwai, Mono, Sigur Ros and god knows how many other instrumental CDs blissfully placed within my ever growing music collection. My collection however, has never contained British band Codes In The Clouds well received debut album 'Paper Canyon', my reasoning being, I already have Explosions In The Sky albums, why would I need a British version of those albums?

Two years on, we have the official sophomore return of Codes In The Clouds (I'm definitely not going to count the tripe that was 'Paper Canyon Recycled', a somewhat abysmal remix album should never be considered a second album) and I'm not going to beat around the bush, they still won't be making it into my CD collection. There is a whole host of instrumental bands and the general way these bands go around being interesting is by layering their sound into a climatic finale. Codes In The Clouds have this ability and more so, the ability to be more than that. They write some stunningly beautiful music, most of which you can imagine being used for uplifting television adverts, but there is literally no direction to this album, you can get to the end of a song, and wonder what the purpose of it actually was and beauty aside, I'm sure we all want to feel like we've achieved something from listening to not only a song, but a record as a whole and there isn't one track on this release that stands apart as being note worthy, which for a band as acclaimed as they are, is disturbing.

There is no doubt in my mind that here we have a group of brilliantly talented musicians, and I am sure that this album will be well received by most critics, but to me, someone who spent a good few years listening to all manner of instrumental albums (including some god awful ones), this is a band that definitely has the ability to create something better, I just wish they would stop disappointing me and would do just that.

2.5 / 5

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