CAPRICORNS

CARPICORNS have given themselves an interesting challenge with their latest release, "River, Bear Your Bones". Without the use of vocals, the trio has written a concept album around the River Thames (which has a history dating back over 58 million years) and the city, London, which crept up from its banks and spread like a cancer across the English countryside. By allowing their arsenal of stoner-prog riffs, monolithic grooves and outburst of spiraling melodies, CAPRICORNS set an intriguing backdrop on which imagination, interpretation and antiquity are left alone to paint the picture. If you stop to think about the amount of raw emotion and human tumult and trauma those waters have experienced since mankind first nursed its shores, the dense mood and heavy-handed crush put forth by "River, Bear Your Bones" takes the album's expressiveness to a cerebral level. If you don't want to look that deeply, then at least you've still got the eight tracks of colossal instrumentation to look forward to.

Much like its inspiration, "River, Bear Your Bones" flows with continual fluidity; one that doesn't recognize standard arrangement or structure and instead sees parts transition seamlessly in and out of one another. Devoid of any over-repetitiveness or hooks, these eight tracks are better taken as a whole rather than on a track by track basis. In fact, for the majority of the album, you really have to be watching the clock to differentiate one song from the next. Minor fades and dedicated intros serve as marker points that define where one ends and another begins, but largely the disc comes across as a vortex of intertwining mood and music. The most noticeable departure from the swirl comes from the elongated closer, "Drinking Water From The Skull Of A Hanged Man", which carries a grittier, more dirge-like element of doom than the preceding seven tunes. Midway through, "River, Bear Your Bones" hits the epitome of its expression on "November Suicides" and "Owing To The Fogs". Both of these tunes take dark minimalism (the latter more than the former),balls-out metallic jamming and star-gazing prog and weave them into twelve minutes that sums up the crux of the album.

Typically, jam-based instrumental albums are reserved for NEUROSIS graduates and PELICAN fans, as the lack of traditional structure tend to leave the attention-deficient record buying masses scratching their heads by track three. CAPRICORNS' tendency to glue their songs together in such an efficient and dynamic manner makes "River, Bear Your Bones" a much easier and more exciting listen than other albums of the same ilk. Not necessarily better or more expansive, but uniquely captivating nonetheless. So dig in, ADD-ers, you now have your instru-metal.