MAN MEETS BEAR - Temples Of Zion

7 songs
17:46 minutes
***** **
Ur Audio-Visual

Bandpage

Canadian musician Soren Brothers recently relocated to Logan, a small town in Northern Utah bordering on Idaho, where he took on a new position as a professor. Temples Of Zion is his first attempt to capture his impressions of his new surroundings, a pretty lonely place, according to the artist himself.

The EP contains seven rather short tracks that make it to nearly eighteen minutes, and they all share the same melancholic mood that you probably fall victim to in those gigantic North American landscapes. The songs are all instrumental, with the rhythm being set by a drum machine and a deeply resonating bass guitar. Add to this a very discreet guitar and an omnipresent melodica that injects a haunting atmosphere throughout the music. At times, there are added effects, like tape dubs, so that occasionally it all sounds like a dub remix of a Western movie soundtrack. At other times, it seems that Soren is using pentatonic scales that make the music sound vaguely Asian.

Temples Of Zion is a short piece of music, and that’s why it works. You best listen to it in one take, and you might understand how somebody must feel in a new environment, devoid of friends and family. I mentioned already the similarity to soundtracks, and to me it often felt a bit like the haunting melodies that were used in the classic American TV show Northern Exposure which also dealt with a metropolitan man being stranded in a lonely new place, in that case Alaska. So yes, it is really pretty music, very melodic, not as experimental maybe as some of Man Meets Bear’s other works. If you don’t mind the harmlessness of it all, you should feel delighted by this short but sweet instrumental EP about Northern Utah.