Hood

You can tell a lot about someone by the company that they keep, so when you see that Hood have played live shows with Mogwai, Pole, Jim O'Rourke and Movietone, you get a fairly good idea of what to expect. And you won't be surprised either; their music has that abstract quality but they manage to keep it within certain boundaries that stops it before it ever becomes anything but listenable. Hood has been incredibly prolific during their eight-year career: four albums, 11 singles, countless compilation tracks and a whole bunch of side projects. Yet Home Is Where It Hurts is their first CD release in North America in about four years. The five tracks on this EP cover quite a lot of ground - there are shorter vocal tracks that prove to be the band's most accessible moments, instrumentals that wouldn't sound out of place on a Mogwai album and strange combinations of both. The whole thing ends with an eight-minute epic, complete with horns that conjures up memories of the late, lamented Bark Psychosis; it's atmospheric, involving and really rather beautiful. This is the very first thing I have heard by Hood and I am suitably impressed. There's a full-length album due in the latter-half of this year and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't project them right into the forefront of the so-called post-rock scene.