If French isn't the official language of post-rock by now, then I think that it well and truly should be. First there was the massive flood of French-Canadian post-rock bands, who despite the fact that most of them didn't actually include any lyrics in their music, still had a distinct French flavour in their cover art, song titles, and attitudes. Then there's the extensive post-rock scene in Europe, which despite having quite a bit of Icelandic and Croatian representation, seems to be most firmly established in the francophone countries. The Evpatoria Report are an excellent example of this, coming from Switzerland, and proudly providing all their press and their website in the French language.

Because of this preference for French over English, and because of the fact that I foolishly attempted to study Japanese instead of French when I was in high school, I don't know all that much more about this band. "Golevka" might be their first album or their hundredth, and nobody in the English-speaking world seems to have much information on them. From listening to their music though, it's obvious that they've been listening to a lot of Mogwai and Mono, because this is primarily guitar-driven music that contains a lot of brooding, menacing string sections within it.

"Golevka" is not only the name of this album, but it is also actually the name of an asteroid (6489 Golevka), to be precise, that was discovered in the town of Evpatoria in Ukraine in 1991. See where this is going? Golevka the asteroid is an Alinda asteroid, which means its orbital path takes it perilously close to the Earth once every four years. This fascination with space is something that crops up again and again with this band, providing a theme for their music that can be understood, no matter what the preferred language of the listener is. Whether this album is a concept album about huge lumps of space rock crashing into the Earth, or whether the band is just as impressed with the beauty and inherent coolness of space as I am, it ties all of the music together into a coherent theme.

True to the post-rock tradition, there are only six tracks on this album, but they are all quite long, the shortest one still being over eight minutes long. These song lengths enable the band to really take their time, for instance the opening track, Prognoz, starts with about three and a half minutes of ambient noise before the first squalls of guitar crash through it. After a brief flurry of loud noise, everything fades back down, and a solitary, mournful string break begins. It then begins to slowly build up to the inevitable crescendo, before it's all released around the ten-minute mark.

The second track begins with some seemingly random cosmonaut radio chatter, before the strings begin again and a gently rolling guitar starts picking out individual notes. It's nothing that original or inventive by post-rock standards, but the near-perfect balance between the string sections and the guitar sections is quite appealing. Cosmic Call also has this attribute, while the guitar plays out a repetitive part and lets the strings drive the melody, both are equally important to the overall character of the song. Dipole Experiment is really the only song where the traditional rock instrumentation takes a back seat, but the eerie choirs and desolate strings more than make up for this until the ten minute mark when some crashing percussion enters the fray, and takes the song to an extremely satisfying conclusion.

"Golevka" isn't a spectacularly original record, but it's one that's put together quite well. I particularly enjoyed the way that no one instrument or style dominated the entire album, it's not like GYBE! where the strings are undoubtedly in charge, or Mogwai-type where string arrangements usually only sound like an afterthought. On the other hand, if you're not the type to enjoy waiting around for ten minutes before a song reaches its climax, perhaps you'd be more satisfied with a bottle of red cordial.