When I tell people that I enjoy post-rock music, I usually get one of two responses. The first, which usually comes from my girlfriend's friends, who are good people, but wouldn't know anything that happens in the wider music world unless it was broadcast on a "club" FM radio station, is "What the hell is post-rock?". The other reaction, which comes from friends of mine at university and in the "scene", is "Isn't post-rock horribly pretentious though? Are you pretentious, Craig?". Usually, against sound judgement, I usually try to argue the point, saying that bands like Sigur Rós, Mogwai and the like have the musical talent and vision to back up their bombast, thereby getting them off the hook. However, a few listens to "Remember The Past, Respect The Future" has convinced me that maybe their analysis of the genre isn't so far off, because this album is as pretentious as a room full of Roger Waters clones.

Even the title of the album just screams "look at us, we're important", in a shrill and irritating tone. Nothing screams "pompous" like attempting to put a horribly clichéd moral lesson into the title of your debut album, and this one most definitely qualifies. But, if the music was good enough, I'd be able to forgive that misstep as a bad idea that somehow got through the screening process. Unfortunately, the music steps up the pomposity to a whole new level.

The music here is slow, ambient, drone music without much form or substance. Clint Lister, the brains behind the band, obviously listens a lot to groups like The Shalabi Effect and Stars of the Lid, but he can't seem to grasp what it is that makes the music of these bands so compelling. Instead of providing basic musical elements like "melody" and "structure", Lister often just lets random drones and haphazard electronic elements go wild for long stretches at a time, not creating a soundscape as much as creating some random noise that isn't pleasant or interesting to listen to.

I was going to say that at some points, listening to outright silence would probably be more interesting than listening to this, but then The Elfman Project rolled around, which proved that Lister out-guessed me, and provided a whopping twenty minutes of absolute silence. Rather than being as interesting as I thought it would be, the silence more or less confirmed Lister's pretentiousness, since who in the world would actually be interested in listening to twenty minutes of nothing? It's not particularly arty or original, and it's for some reason deeply enraging to hear someone trying to pass it off as some kind of artistic statement.

I can't quite decide whether Broken Hands for Brilliant Minds is actually serious about their music, or whether this is all a poke at the ostentatious attitude that this genre of music seems to engender. Either way, the fact that the most positive feature of the album is the packaging (which is very nice, by the way), should be all the warning you need to stay well away.