If you'd asked me a year ago if I'd ever get tired of experimental chamber pop sort of music, I would have said "no". For awhile, it looked like a small cadre of classical musicians, brought up on a steady diet of indie rock, were going to create something special that would revolutionise the music world. Unfortunately, as we can now see, most of the bands have played themselves into a corner, trapped by their own sense of self-importance and an irrational desire to create a mythos of anonymity and mystery. These bands think they're terribly important and relevant to today's world, the rest of us think they're made up of pretentious bints who really should have quit while they were ahead.

Like most new bands in this genre, Esmerine take a lot of musical cues from Godspeed You Black Emperor!, which probably isn't surprising since one half of this band used to actually be in that band. Also like most new albums in the genre, it comes with suitably beautiful, abstract and meaningless coverart, and an album title that takes up two or three lines of paper if you try to write it down. Again like other bands, the music here comprises mainly of classical instruments mimicking some rock conventions, and it's also instrumental. Are you beginning to see the problem here?

The thing that makes this album so tiring and disappointing is not the execution of the music, which I have to admit is pulled off pretty well. The thing which ruins the album is that, for Esmerine, it's still 1998. If this had been released just a few short years ago, it would have been a visionary masterpiece. As it is, every single moment on this album is a "been there, done that" experience. The only notable difference is that the songs are a bit shorter here, but other than that, they follow the same old "establish, build, crescendo, release" format that a million other bands have done to death over the past couple of years.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, because as background listening music, this certainly isn't a bad album, and if that were what the band were going for, I'd declare it to be a qualified success. Unfortunately, Esmerine have about all the charm of Simon Crean with a bad case of the flu, and listening to the album, it's obvious that they think that they have a good chance at becoming the next musical messiah. I'd hate to discourage them, but if they want a shot at that role, they're going to have to do a lot better than this.