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Review: 'In Lights'
'This is How We Exist'   

-  Label: '1724 records'
-  Genre: 'Post-Rock' -  Release Date: '8th November 2017'

Our Rating:
In Lights are a post-rock band based in San Jose, CA. ‘This is How We Exist’ is their debut album, and features seven songs. Seven suitably long instrumental songs, which build layer upon layer of cyclical motifs shaped with interweaving guitars which echo and chime into blustery crescendos.

They cascade and tumble, they inch and soar. Oh, how they soar, evermore stratospheric. ‘Search’ (the album’s second shortest song at a mere 5’34”) witnesses the arrival of a skyward-bound violin atop the tempest of guitars and thumping rhythm section. Elsewhere, the tempo slows and the strings brood and emote over softly picked guitars and a slow bass thrum.

The purpose of the album, according to the band, is to convey a story and an emotion through each song. And while the specifics of each emotion or the narrative trajectory of each piece isn’t necessarily clear, they do succeed in delivering a work that has a dynamic and textural range, with movement through changes of tone and tempo.

If it seems that after almost 15 years, the force of post-rock has dissipated, with so many acts of the school of 2002-2005 having moved on (I Like Trains have evolved and are generally less active; Vessels have gone electro; Maybeshewill are no more; Her Name is Calla are almost an acoustic folk act), acts like In Lights, in their return to the territories first explored and the templates set by Explosions in the Sky, serve to remind that ‘traditional’ post-rock still has a place.


  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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In Lights - This is How We Exist