Who believes in patterns?
A lashout of patterns, Twelve handsels a strong album. Piano, viola. Pause. Guitar. Drums. And the atmosphere starts getting miserable. Pause. Bass. Music. The first songs gets you wondering -is there any kind of evolution in this? Any sort of progress? The guitar sounds are harsh, reminding the distinctive riffs of Hot Cross at times. They pretty much sound like scratches on your eardrum. Sit back. The complicated musical themes are combined with jazz lines.

The second track is raising the feeling of anticipation, and a sax is keeping a mellow travel across the scales. It brings in mind the music of John Zorn mashed with sludge and pretty flowers. There is no exact point of ending for the song, in fact it can go on a loop eternally -and instrumentally, it is connected to the following song, Six, which breaks the ice after a stressful introduction.

So This Is Our Home has some vague traces of Defiance, Ohio! or Erin Tobey. And still it fits in the album, although it’s not really obeying to the saturnine character of the rest songs. The pass to the next track (Eight) is soft and discreet. The female vocals appearing in both songs help in connecting them, and the walk from absolute melody to the outbreak of Eight is interesting and still gentle. Eight is like a desperate face that emerged out of So This Is Our Home and the lyrics are summing up the whole album -disappointed, devastating, miserable, melancholic, black, tender, angry, questioning.

Finishing with the Country Song, a twisty guitar starts and the almost-out-of-tone-accompaniment of the viola create a haunted, ill atmosphere. It could be considered as a tragic ironic response to the common country songs; actually, it seems to be ambivalent between irony and solemnity. The song gives a decadent, abandoned, tired end to the album -it leaves a bitter taste. This helps in digesting the album as an entity. The songs lose some of their meaning when listened to separately, as there is a sequence between them. This is pretty obvious because the ending of one song is the beginning of the next one.

The album has moments of silence against terrible noise, and the band seems to have pursued the succession of low-profile parts by outbreaks. Still, they don’t get purely chaotic or pitchlessly noisy. There is some balance between what they sing and what they shout.

Echo-effect: it is reoccurring throughout the album. Rhythmic changes are also common during songs, ranging from post-rock-ish slow vibrant notes to conserved violent phrases. Change the vocals and you get a clearer version of Circle Takes The Square’s music. It is an album that gets you full. Most songs are pretty long (e.g. Twelve, Seven, Three, Nine) but intervals of mental relaxation also exist. The music is mature, swarming with strange noises and subtle -or obvious- melodies. The way the songs impose their mood in the room, it can get massive, so at times the thin line between substance and exhaustion is maybe infringed.

Mixed vocals (female & male) also support the tonal variety of the songs, because the music is mostly moving in lower pitches.

Believes In Patters, a piece of distorted art, the work of a foggy Saturday night with the streetlights smudging their glow around them, dull music coming out of the buildings nearby, and you flying to waste, vanishing in patterns.

Thanks to QsLv_ for sending me this review.

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