Smoke Bellow

On their fourth, and sadly final album, Baltimore/Aussie outfit Smoke Bellow strip their sound down to its most basic elements and begin to build it back, finding a balance between minimalism and post-punk. The band’s often been brittle, but on Structurally Sound they let the spaces between bloom, carving cocoons built into negative space. Softness sneaks into the sound here, with synths wrapping themselves around the band’s Rube Goldberg rhythms. They shed the more caustic corners of their oeuvre in favor of something more iridescent. It’s hard to reconcile Terry Riley and Au Pairs, but Smoke Bellow find a place where they exist in a kind of symbiosis.

Hung on rhythm, the record skitters and stomps. Drums beat like blood pounding in the ears, clatter like the engine break rumble of traffic. They capture the elemental cadences that surround us and suture them to a velvet lining. Past albums splintered and sawed sounds into itchy angles, but on Structurally Sound, the group has placed a priority on softness, color. and shape, cracking their past roughness open to reveal geodes sparkling underneath. Horns that once bleat with a post-punk defiance instead twine with the keys into hypnotic patterns. The band picks up the broken glass of the past to construct a kaleidoscope vision of the future. The result is an album that moves the needle on the post-punk revival, no longer lingering in the shadows of the past, but instead building crystalline temples for the future.

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