Following their debut EP Summer Wars, from 2021, Through the Dying Light (Self-Released) is the debut full-length by Boston, instrumental three-piece Lesotho. Promoting themselves as “post-everything”, the album sees the group fashion a big ISIS-invoking landscape of powerful drums and chiming guitars. Blanketed over all of this sits a constant melancholic air of sadness to the whole proceedings potentially leading the listener to wonder “Gee, what happened to these guys?!”
Maybe the everpresent sadness that seeps out of this music isn’t so surprising, after all Lesotho is a band born in the age of our recent global pandemic, a kind of existential ennui seems to be built into the music. Which is not to make it sound like this music is lacking energy. Though the band likes to play with extended floating passages of chiming guitars (there are a lot of chiming guitars in this music) like icy smoke, while the drums and bass hang back, just as often the music is powerfully driven by a foundation of hard-hitting drum fills and propulsive rhythms.
Nevertheless what becomes apparent pretty much by the second track “Crown of Echoes” is that the music contained here follows a very recognisable pattern of heavy/quiet dynamics (in various configurations) with ringing, echoing guitars very much establishing the tone and mood. Opener ‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field’ builds slowly from guitar arpeggios, drums and synths, bearing some whiff of Radiohead with that shimmering guitar sound they so effectively honed over the years. Radiohead however never really went full-on post-Rock with their drums.
Indeed drummer Zach Ganshirt might be the standout of this trio. Most often throughout this record, it’s his drum work (on tracks like ‘Truth’ and ‘Running Down the Sides’) that stand out in what otherwise has a tendency to get somewhat samey. To be sure, the sound the band has constructed is pretty gorgeous. It’s a lush, rich texture that brings to mind (a warmer) Neurosis at their most thoughtful (like on A Sun That Never Sets), or their offshoot group Red Sparrows. Credit is also due to guitarist Kyle Loffredo and bassist Cliff Cazeau (also supplying the synth) for effectively building a mood without the need for vocals or lyrics. It’s just that when the mood is unchanging for fifty minutes, you really have to be in the mood… for that mood.
There’s a fairly consistent flow between short to medium tracks with the album’s bigger set-pieces, which culminate with the album’s longest pieces ‘The Great Fault’ and ‘Closer’ dead (with shortest track ‘One Wolf Watches’ sandwiched in between). The music itself, meanwhile, is very consistent. It’s hard to imagine the band producing a dud track, everything flows along in a very agreeable fashion.
Maybe some more varied instrumentation peppered through the album would help to construct some different tones?
On their Bandcamp page, the band cite a variety of influences from Queens of the Stone Age to Black Sheep Wall. These influences aren’t necessarily so easy to spot—though aside from the Radiohead associations there are sometimes hints of the Cure or Deftones (at their calmest) or even the Twin Peaks (Julie Cruise) soundtrack. In any case, you can certainly say that Lesotho has constructed an identifiable sound, not a revolutionarily novel one, but it definitely does what it does with conviction and quality musicianship (without any massive peaks to really set the hairs on the back of your neck tingling).
Altogether Through the Dying Self is a well-delivered fifty minutes of instrumental post-Rock, epic in sonic delivery and melancholic in tone. If you want to feel quietly sad while beautiful, shimmering guitars wash over you to powerful, mid-paced rhythms, hop on board.
Buy the album here:
https://lesotho.bandcamp.com/album/through-the-dying-light
7 / 10
TOM OSMAN