STILLPOINT Archive: last updated 12/07/2012
by John Dixon Mirisola '11
Alumni band Caspian released its third full-length album, Waking Season, this September through Triple Crown Records. Already winning high praise from major publications like Spin, Rolling Stone and Alternative Press, the band’s latest collection of driving sound-sculptures is the finest of its career. Laid out (and dramatically oversimplified) below is some of what you can expect from Waking Season:
Vocals are subtle and sparse. This is not a bad thing. Carefully paced crescendos, rhythmic ebbs and flows, rich sonic textures—these are the album’s key players, working together to evoke feeling, rather than focusing on a lyrically preordained meaning.
Progress and patience. Often, the album’s classically-influenced melodies spiral forward, shifting and evolving as songs swell furiously. Other pieces seem frozen, contemplative. These themes of motion and stasis feel profoundly at home in an album called Waking Season.
Dark is not depressing. Through the album’s many intensely minor-key moments, the music evokes a mood more akin to awe than to despair. Waking Season meditates on the serious, the surprising and the mysterious, but never at the expense of something ultimately hopeful.
Caspian is Philip Jamieson ’01, Calvin Joss ’03, Erin Burke-Moran ’03, Chris Friedrich and Joe Vickers.
NEXT: Bruce Herman's Work in Collaborative Exhibition Based on "Four Quartets"
