Alight

Quite the opposite from the prog-inspired title, the music on the Guelph, ON band’s debut is deliberate, delicate, and delightfully slow; think GY!BE without the loud, crashing dirges, or Sea Snakes if they employed violins and lost their pop. Of course, all this beauty comes at a price, which is that some of these lovely epics drag on, leaving movements, and even entire songs, floating in the ether of innocuousness. "Alone We Will Go” is by far the tightest and most engaging song due to Spiritualized psych sound, and "For the Rocks Dancing” is half a great song. Alight seems to flit about their instrumental sounds, never coming to a final conclusion of whether they want to fit in a more pop-based Broken Social Scene sound, or the less-is-more soundscapes of Labradford. They show incredible promise, though, on their sublime triumvirate of end songs, especially album highlight, "Nothing is Hidden and Nothing is Lost,” with its Radiohead synths and breathtakingly intimate chorus. Alight sound like a band still finding itself, as for every intoxicating violin vibrato, there are three minutes of needless, somnambulant repetition. Grab some screwdrivers and a scythe to tighten things up, cut the wheat from the chafe and the world should easily fall before them.