Album Review: False Hope For The Savage – False Hope For The Savage; Cardiff band produce a glittering self titled album of yearning post-rock.

Cardiff post-rock outfit False Hope For The Savage released their debut self titled album back in August, but with the physical release now out, we took the opportunity to take a closer look (and listen) to the album that has set tongues wagging.

Containing seven songs written, rehearsed and refined between 2017 and 2020, when the sessions for the album took place and according to the band themselves, it serves as a time capsule of how the band sounded at a certain point in time.

What can be said if this album as a whole is it’s a beautiful set of songs and sounds, steeped in post rock without being fixated with it. The band manages to find melodic moments in all the songs, it’s just that they are then scuffed up, drawn out, morphed and warped into something else with their triple guitar assault. That’s not to say it’s all noisy because it isn’t. There are plenty of moments of repose and reflection contained within, and the guitars chime and send their spidery fingers over the tracks just as often as they wave big riffs and noise in your faces.

Achipalago is typical of this. Built on a simple five note riff, it gradually unfurls through its 6 something minutes, ebbing and flowing from gentle undulations to smacking you squarely in the face – not through aggression, more layers – the echo laden guitar lines often bleeding into eachother, but also just this glorious noise they seem to produce.

In truth, there’s not a weak moment on the record, from the sprawling opening gambit Better Things Left Unsaid, through the shoegazey wash of Little Empires and the brilliant, bitter melancholy of single Motherless Brooklyn, right to the monumental closing track Stalker.

Mood and atmosphere is what is draped over the music, and that’s what leaves it in your heart, above a lot of the formulaic post-rock out there. As the band say themselves ‘We feel that each track conveys a unique feeling but that there is an overriding atmosphere that runs through the entire record. It is an album steeped in feelings of nostalgia, longing, solace and introspection’.

Don’t let this album escape you, it has to be one of 2023s best and most complete records. All hail False Hope For The Savage.