FURNITURE - Twilight Chases The Sun

Furniture - Twilight Chases The Sun

10 songs
66:03 minutes
***** ****
Planet Of Sounds

Bandpage

With its thirty million inhabitants and its location in the thriving economy of South East Asia, Malaysia should also have an interesting pop music culture. Too often, bands from that part of the world just don’t get exposure in Europe. Therefore it’s fortunate that the Belgian based company Planet Of Sounds has started to remedy the situation. Furniture released their debut album already in late 2005, but it still sounds fresh enough to justify a review more than two years later.

Using ingredients from genres like post rock, shoegaze and chamber pop, Furniture craft a sound which works most of the time very homogeneous but allows them to try different directions. After a one minute intro, Postcards starts the album with a bitter sweet pop twist, although from there on, the band shows its liking for longer structures, especially on the second half of the album where the songs are nearly all about eight minutes long. Furniture sound for instance warmer than the Icelandic Sigur Ros, more grounded than the ethereal Mercury Rev, and that’s where the Malaysians earn points. There are always parallels yet the band never feels the need to outright copy their influences.

On the eleven minute closer Fin, Furniture lose a bit their steam, and the experimental Why Is Adam King? also lacks the emotional impact of their other material, but in the end we are still left with a load of great music with sometimes sprawling, symphonic dimensions that sounds very Western, making it hard to believe that this album has been recorded by a band from a country I never, or rarely, heard pop music before. Fans of dreamy post rock / shoegaze with a certain punch need to give this exotic and beautifully packaged CD a try.

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