The Evpatoria Report

Maar, the second effort by Switzerland’s Evpatoria Report, starts out promisingly, with ambient keyboard swells slowly leading into a mid-tempo march with utilitarian rhythm guitar, but then "Eighteen Robins Road” ends up leading to chord recycling and predictable slide guitar leads for nearly ten minutes. It’s about a 17-minute track and to be fair, it does travel a bit more in the home stretch. There are a couple other scattered moments of interest over the four long-winded songs comprising Maar but they’re nothing post-rock fans haven’t heard a couple hundred times before. The Evpatoria Report have heart but heart doesn’t do much to make them contenders in a field with exceptional benchmarks set by GYBE, Explosions in the Sky and the Netherlands’ We Vs. Death. They’re kind of like the post-rock Coldplay: capable, catchy and inoffensive but utterly derivative and bland.