Q – When is prog not prog? A – When it’s post rock!
Cloud Castle Lake (view their MySpace) strike you instantly as the sort of band who might use phrases along the lines of “sonic texture” whilst practicing, unfortunately they seem not to have realised that not all textures are pleasant – hedgehogs for example. Whilst their post-rock synth noodling will occasionally strike a moment of beauty through the clouds of guitar effects and echoed voices they arrive both rarely and fleetingly before being rolled beneath all 18 wheels, rather like a hedgehog (I think that the hedgehog analogy may have run dry at this point,).
The delicate, falsetto vocals were too often destroyed by the continual presence of echo effects for any comprehension, which is a real shame as there’s no doubt that the singer has presence in front of the band and as a clearly literate band (they take their name from a collection of short stories by Vladimir Nabokov) it would be interesting to know what they had to say.
The short-lived moments of subdued melancholy though were at times truly excellent, complimented entirely by the unusual, almost antique, setting of the print room on campus as part of the Dublin fringe festival, but as always it was only a matter of time before they were drowned out by guitars that sounded so like the keyboards it was confusing why they would decide to choose between them. Cloud castle lake may well be worth watching in the future if only to see what direction they might take – just as you might watch a hedgehog on a spaceship. Sorry.
