Rest
An alternative review of Rest's album 'Operation: Impending Doom'
Review
Snapshot:
Although the success of label-mates and similarly-styled Ten Past Seven's debut
album last year was small scale, it was apparently enough to convince Out On A
Limb that the way to break the market is pushing brash instrumental metal of a
peculiarly Corkonian bent. The result of this is a less engrossing, less
commercially palatable but greatly more stable, balanced and ambitious work.
The Cluas Verdict: 6.5 out of 10.
Full Review:
The term mini-album as applied to Rest's Operation: Impending Doom, is a
total misnomer. Even disregarding the laughable 'mini', the word 'album' has
implications of a collection, a reduction of the disparate many into the
hopefully-cohesive singular, is totally inaccurate in describing a twenty-minute
opus of instrumental metal and fluctuating moods, distended to the breaking
point of control, and somewhat arbitrarily divided into two separate tracks.
Throughout the album, Rest prove themselves masters of the squealing discordant
tremolo guitar work and slow tension building of Mogwai, the frenetic time and
tempo changes of Ten Past Seven, the carefully restrained wildness of the
Redneck Manifesto and the sheer immensity of concept and ambition of God Speed
You! Black Emperor. Yet for all their sharing of common traits, Rest have a
unique tone and almost didactic feeling of determination that set Operation:
Impending Doom apart from the plethora of similar-minded bands.
Perhaps what most sets Rest apart is the attitude that can be best described as
a sort of musical existentialism: the preoccupation with the now and the
expression of the experience as it unfolds from one second to the next. This has
the profoundly strange effect of making the album instantly forgettable once
it's over, but a totally new experience on each listen.
Check
out this other (but less positive)
review of 'Operation Impending
Doom' by another CLUAS writer.
