The best songs of Ester Drang’s career.

Artist: Ester Drang
Album: Rocinate
Label: Jade Tree
Tracks: 10
Running Time: 46.18



If you ask a music critic to review Nickelback or Ester Drang, 83.27 per cent will choose Nickelback because it’s easy. You see, Ester Drang is hard to pick. Up until now they’ve been temperamental, only occasionally bothering to hint at something more than what every other atmospheric rock band is doing.

Infinite Keys was welcomed by most critics, and rightfully so. But it was a band playing within its ability. Enter Rocinate. A delicate, inspired and occasionally downright wonderful record filled to the top with the best songs of Ester Drang’s career.

Opener Come Back Alive hands out a bed of warm strings and a wandering bass line ahead of horns and a distorted freak-out of piano, guitar and whatever else may have been lying around at the time. And normally that’s where Ester Drang would leave it. But this time they push the song and they triumph. Bryce Chambers’ voice wearily pleads, “come back alive/come back tonight” and a single low down piano key joins him, then James McAlister rolls in and elegiac horns weep over the top of it all. You’re only 4.30 in to a near 50 minute album and you’re trying to stop yourself from getting carried away, it’s only February, you’re not supposed to be thinking about making lists and defences for choices just yet.

Valencia’s Dying Dream doesn’t do a hell of a lot to convince you otherwise. The bands shoegazer roots come through but the throbbing bass is too relentlessly optimistic and Chambers sounds too much like Jonathan Donahue for it to be the direct descendent of the year 1991.

Hooker With A Heart Of Gold lifts off with a spaghetti western drum/string/horn workout before Chambers enters, dominating the song but still allowing the space the band have always given to their work. He might be singing about Mary Magdalene but he’s likely not – Ester Drang isn’t a band given to obviousness.

Don’t worry about that nasty gap between the melancholic ambience of Great Expectations and the electro warble of Everyone is a Victim, they’ve listened through and know the two songs sit perfect side-by-side.

Ester Drang have finally taken that step from a band more than capable to a band intent on making each song the best of their lives. Rocinate sounds like a first album, it sounds like these men have poured their entirety into, every influence and every experience in a delicately balanced beauty.