You Left Us in the Spring by Vangas

For fans of Dazzling Killmen, Swans, Shearling, post rock, and emotional explosion that detonates as shock turns to grief, You Left Us in the Spring by Vangas speaks in a breathtakingly subtle, relentlessly tense aesthetic voice to shout tales of deep, dark, empty loss. Humble, understated guitar work, the likes of which haven’t appeared often in post rock since its inception with Slint thirty five years ago, stake out a claim to the far stereo channels, adding a driving rhythm to the record’s sonic core of foreboding drones. Through this masterful composition and excellent partition of stereo space, Vangas achieves a cinematic atmosphere while avoiding the bombastic excesses common to other cinematic music, drawing us into a world we find both completely believable and utterly horrifying. By engaging with this album, we choose to subject ourselves to a magnified, slow-motion view of one of the darkest moments of our lives, a process both immensely painful and deeply rewarding. Finally, we see the wheels turn as our nightmare becomes reality, and we learn to leave that old fantasy behind.