Metavari – Be One of Us and Hear No Noise

Fort Wayne, Indiana’s Metavari craft delicate post rock songs, brimming with tension and sparse beauty.  Tommy Cutter (guitar), Andrew McComas (drums), Nate Utesch (keys), and Ty Brinneman (bass) mix dense instrumental interplay with toned-down electronica rather pleasantly, creating a wonderful balance of their abilities on the LP Be One of Us and Hear No Noise.  Also, Metavari injects some fresh insights into the genre, particularly their use of recorded radio or film snippets spliced in to accentuate the tone and feel of Be One of Us and Hear No Noise.

The record itself flows spendidly, nicely weaving into new chapters while maintaining a crucial continuity.  From album opener “Kings Die Like Other Men,” a song that includes spoken recordings about optimism long past for the now-fallen Detroit, to the epic closer “Pacific Lights,” the LP moves deftly without spinning too far out of control. Be One of Us and Hear No Noise creates an atmosphere of delicate openness while still maintaining a dramatic element as it careens to the close.  Only one song serves purely as an interlude (the penultimate track “Story for a Song Without an End”) and it features the mellifluous chatter of a child which surely lends the record its air of innocence and imagination, so even the song-as-a-plot-device placement is forgivable.

The album truly builds, however, to “Pacific Lights,” a shimmering track that contains elemental similarity to the other groundwork laid on Be One of Us and Hear No Noise but then meanders into territory unexplored previously.  The guitars and electronics mingle gleefully, creating the climax that eludes the listener in the previous acts of the LP.  The drums drive and guide the string-laden rise of “Pacific Lights,” constantly building, growing, maturing into a understated yet explosive swirl akin to the breakdown of an Agaetis byrjun song (the sparse and playful nature of this particular LP reminds me very much of the set of songs Sigur Ros created for Merce Cunningham’s “Split Sides”).  At this point, the electronics seem far from the fray, while strings and harps swell, cymbals crash, the snare drum stutters, and the clouds open for a split second before sliding closed.

Overall, Metavari’s debut LP is an all-out impressive effort, a solid instrumental/post-rock genre entry that constantly feels airy and sharp, smart and calculated, pretty and dense.  Never is there too much instrumentation or too little; great effort was clearly poured into finding the right balance of Metavari’s elements.  From a band that once rearranged Pet Sounds in front of a sold-out theater audience, it seems that they’ve taken notes from the perfectly arranged albums of years past and applied it to their own sound.  Be One of Us and Hear No Noise stands as a great debut from a band that can now delve deeper into lesser-explored regions of other genres; they have nothing left to prove in this one.