our sleepless forest

Our Sleepless Forest

Having first come to public attention via the Type Records compilation 'Free The Future', South London trio Our Sleepless Forest have prepared a full-length for Resonant, home of the chilliest post-rock sounds around. This lot make an especially ambient variant of that particular genre though, setting their tuneful guitar runs amongst a backdrop of various outdoorsy sounds, as on 'The Tinderbox', which is fleshed out with sounds from echoing spaces and tweeting birds. None of this sounds particularly fresh or original on paper, but Our Sleepless Forest pull it off with more of dreamlike finesse than most. Expanding their sound further, 'Doors In Limbo' moves into a glacially slow orchestral mode - almost like a Stars Of The Lid composition. Fragments of percussion creep into the clouds of hiss and echo on 'White Bird' and 'Nomads', sounding not dissimilar from the tranced-out drones of Kranky's White Rainbow. All the echo and cloaked sounds clear up a little by the time 'The Clarion' comes around. You can make out a full band in there, making like early Sigur Ros performing in some shaded cavern somewhere at the heart of a forest. It functions as a bit of a payoff for all the swirling, amorphous potential stirred up elsewhere on the album, which taken as a whole is a pretty terrific first outing.