The first track, “Mine Field” starts with dark, introductory piano; before an equally dark, shimmering drone emerges in all its reverbed glory. This pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the album. The two long tracks are post-rock derived, “build and fall” crescendos; full of delay and reverb and dividing their time between “instrumental” work and processing. This instrumental work consists mainly of hanging piano notes, soaring violin drones and languid guitar; whilst the processing normally involves the creation of a thick, reverb-heavy drone from the aforementioned instruments. Despite the the mention of “thickness”, the overall sound is often rather shallow and “sparse” - in the sense that there is often only a couple of things at most going on: its not a many-layered recording. This definite sense of it being a “one man show” and not a full band comes to the fore with the guitar halfway through “Boots On The Ground”; it’s bizarrely over-powered, like Caspar Brotzmann set to “drone”. The strength of the guitar in the mix, and its lack of sympathetic support, curiously forces us to listen to it as “sound”, rather than “a guitar solo”; but, regardless, it simply sounds rather odd and unbalanced.

The two shorter tracks are somewhat throwaway, really. “Marching Time”, unless I’m missing something, is a recording of snares which is then looped and layered under itself; to little or no effect whatsoever. “Cold Haunt” fares somewhat better to my ears, but amounts to a rhythmic motif which strides away through cavernous reverb, to be joined by guitar annotations and twirls. Again, nothing too exciting to write home about.

 “Soldier’s Requiem” (or “Solider’s Requiem” as the promo sleeve would rather I believe) is not all irredeemable, but it does wallow in the most obvious of emotive “button-pushes”. In that respect, its arguably successful at creating a melancholy atmosphere; but beyond that, it does very little really. Perhaps the most effective section, is the last minute or so of “Boots…”; where a dark drone is played out over a subdued field recording of rain. Here, the rain acts as a beautifully delicate texture and I’m forced to compare it with its use at the start of the track, where it accompanies guitar wanderings - purely, it seems, as a emotive signifier of “melancholy”. The album seems to be caught between two shores, with little hope of reaching either: the “instrumental” element is rather slight in content and the “processing” side of things is somewhat unremarkable. Put together, it doesn’t amount to a whole lot.