Clocks & Clouds

This six-song EP isn’t a tentative litmus test for a slapdash band of mates just dabbling in the music business; Minneapolis 3-piece Clocks & Clouds’ ‘The Creation of Matter’ EP is a sampler – an appetiser confidentially preparing us for their new studio album which is to be released in 2015. If this is the standard we can come to expect next year, the bar has been set to a perilously high level.

The album boasts captivatingly haunting yet striking orchestral scoring – the kind you get accompanying the blockbusters you see on the big screen - rather than lining traditional pop charts. Each song is an instrumental of operatic quality, fraught with swells and stabs that breath expressive life into the album. Though ‘The Creation of Matter’ may be devoid of any lyricism, its ability to provoke emotion hasn’t hampered at all thanks to its almost foreboding nature.

Heavily led by spritely cello and violin playing, the pace builds menacingly in each song offering a unique combination of rock-like intensity with the eruptive beauty of classical compositions. The band liken themselves to a mixture of “Skrillex, Mozart and Muse” and you quickly hear why. The album exhibits a healthy appreciation for acoustic and electronic instrumentation to create a veritable smorgasbord of atmospheric soundscapes.

‘The Creation of Matter’ is very grandiose, engorged with strings and complimented by electronic elements and simple drum frills. One can imagine an extravagant illusion being performed to it. It’s not very often that you get a band that consists of a violinist, a cellist and a drummer as the focal point intended to create punchy, edgy post-rock albums, but Clocks & Clouds have done something different with the much maligned classical genre that has reinvigorated the sound and opened it up to a more modern market.