Tagged: hcbreviews

Excerpt: "Quality Instrumental Post-Rock with a fierce emotion that will blast your face off for its entirety. This album is a stroke of magnificence that is rare in the world today. It transcends the regular notions of what music is, creating a radical art form that emphasizes perfection... The songs blend together to form a tsunami of shredding guitars, loud violins, free horns, booming basses and hammering drums... One of the greatest of its genre, and one of the greatest in music." WRUV Reviews

Excerpt (translated from the Italian): "A remarkable quantity of electric, acoustic and electronic instruments, and voice used occasionally, with which HC-B create their imaginative soundtracks, unifying post-punk, post-rock and the avant-garde in eclectic compositions. More authoritative and intriguing than their album Sliding On Barents Sea (2003), Soundcheck For A Missing Movie hypnotizes with eight complex episodes, where physical flashes sometimes break cerebral and emotional harmonies' calm." Il Mucchio Selvaggio

Excerpt (translated from the Italian): "two different faces in one soul: the first dissonant, moving music of legendary proportions in loud masses with a large ensemble; the second introverted, defined by math-rock grids. HC-B's aesthetics are oriented to the reconstruction of livid and rough landscapes... Obscure and violent emotions, mitigated by the magical artifices of poetry. 8/103 Rockerilla

Excerpt: "Sicilian quintet HC-B have bundled together a glorious collection of tracks here that summons the restraint and patience of bands like The For Carnation, the energy and effervescence of math-rock, and a gorgeous melodic sensibility that reminds us all why we liked post-rock in the first place... an album of small details - gutteral guitars are lifted up by wisps of white noise, delicate passages float by just that little bit smoother via backing theremins, and the occasional string section adds the requisite cinematic flourishes for which the album claims its title... enough inspired twists and solid jams to [...]

Excerpt: "The band takes us on a journey through images they have captured in their mind, reforming them into a wide variety of tracks, ranging from cliff-hanging moments featuring crashing cymbals and feedback-laden electric guitar to the romantic and melodic sound of glockenspiels and strings. The group not only showcases these elements expertly, but infuses them together along with the sounds of trumpets, samples, clarinet, powerful bass guitar, piano, and synth sounds... Soundcheck for a Missing Movie is a must-listen for its unique, post rock-based take on the usual symphonic movie soundtrack we expect in our heads, a [...]

Excerpt (translated from the Italian): "Today it's so hard to find an album that communicates so much; a disc which transmits true emotions... This is a well-played album that marks an evolution from their previous album Sliding on Barents Sea (2003)." Beat, June 2009

Excerpt (translated from the Italian): "HC-B are five Italian guys from Catania that have been playing together for 10 years... a fusion of sound and images, long phrasings, evident rhythms. Their music is independent rock; in fact, there aren't any pop motifs nor banal verse/refrain structures, moving away from any known definitions toward its own universe." I Love Sicilia, May 2009

Excerpt: "This is an album that is vast in scope and imagination. Ranging from the seductively melodic, through to thrillingly intense and dramatic movements, it will both stimulate and captivate the listener. Its power is that it successfully creates a labyrinth of vivid visual images within your mind, like those left behind by the man who provided the inspiration... The album triumphantly builds towards several peaks of symphonic brilliance. Attention to detail, well developed ideas, and formidable instrumentation are all very much to the fore... It is little wonder that Hidden Shoal Recordings have been likened to 4AD. Bringing expansive music of this quality, [...]

Excerpt (translated from the Italian): "The new album of HC-B, an underground band of exceptional quality, already shown in their previous works, surprises with some audacious deeds and the development of their arrangements... Here we have a massive hard rock orchestra with some overflowing woodwinds, a sweet trumpet ballad, strings-rich post-folk, noise-rock backed by metronomic drums, and moments approaching the visionary Godspeed You Black Emperor!" Blow Up #133, June 2009

"Italians and film music: a match made in heaven – the Holy Trinity being Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota and Dario Argento soundtrackers Goblin; however as Catania-based Hidden Shoal signees HC-B indicate, haunting soundscapes can exist separately from the celluloid. Named after famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the cinemaphonic quintet have been recreating the atmosphere of murky movie theatres and grainy projections since 1999. Soundcheck For A Missing Movie, their latest LP, finds the band looking for a perfect spaghetti western/Mafia tale to score and instead writing an engrossing collection of elegiac etudes with enough potential to transcend the cinemascope. Opening [...]

Excerpt: "Think Giardini di Mirò's the only 'Italian instrumental rock' outfit worth listening to? Not if HC-B has anything to say about it, as proven by the Sicilian quintet's explosive, fifty-five-minute opus Soundcheck for a Missing Movie ... What distinguishes HC-B's sound is the energy and intensity which they bring to its material—even a somber, two-minute interlude such as 'Dead Horse Walking' feels on the verge of detonation, and much the same could be said for the dreamy 'Slow Compensation' and Red -like 'Crystal Lane.' Soundcheck for a Missing Movie may be a studio recording [...]

Excerpt: "Mostly instrumental, the record has more in common with the likes of Do Make Say Think and Grails than it does with the hoards of quiet-loud merchants. They're not afraid to lift the pace higher than the usual stately plod, either. Album highlight 'Hot Afternoon In The Bulls' Square' comes in with a military snare drum clatter and a driving bass line redolent of Pink Floyd's 'One Of These Days'. With the melody driven by the horns, it's refreshingly direct... 'Crystal Lane' starts all shoegazy, but then ends like Led Zeppelin, with some Bonhamesque tubthumping and some gloriously paleolithic [...]

"The band I'm most interested in is Hotels, who I've known casually over the past few years. They have a catchy, keyboard driven sound and an emotionally distant vocalist in singer Blake Madden. They had just released their latest album, Where Hearts Go Broke last month and from the little I've heard, it's a lot more accessible than their previous work. The band was also singled out in the latest issue of Seattle Sound magazine by KEXP's John Richards as one of the five bands he expects to break out in 2009." [...]

Excerpt: "HC-B employ a myriad of instrumentation to create an impassioned, often bombastic sound. There's an air of King Crimson-esque authority to a number of tracks... The five core members of this band collaborate with string sections and brass arrangements throughout, entangling their guitars, bass and percussion in a sea of elegant instrumentation, along with subtle touches of synth, electronics and ghostly Theremin howls. Such a policy results in inspiring, crescendo-laden numbers like 'Playing with Planes' which builds momentum via introspective hues not a million miles away from Tortoise... HC-B cram as much as possible into Soundcheck 's 50-minute [...]

Excerpt: "opening track 'A Dusty Book, A City Of Lights' sets an elegant standard, with its dreamy, jazz-like beginning that builds up to a crescendo of heavy bass, celebrating horns, frantic drums and an insisting guitar. And as many of the other tracks on this album, it is an almost ten-minute-long pleasure to listen to. Just holding you on the verge of noisiness. This balance between the melodic, almost atmospheric symphonic, and the more noise-rock expression is some of what impresses me the most with this brilliant album.... And here I could have gone on an on about the small [...]

Excerpt (translated from the Italian): "on this superb Soundcheck For A Missing Movie , snapshots become animated, slides find colours: the wild tramping of a bull herd towards a boiling arena ('Hot Afternoon In The Bulls' Square'), a book covered with dust, but lit up by a city's lights ('A Dusty Book, A City Of Lights'), the shadow of a child playing with a toy plane ('Playing With Planes') and, at last, a film that finds the good that we all thought had disappeared ('Missing Movie'). The projector restarts, jams and cuts out; the record is finished, the movie [...]

Excerpt: "In a very precise manner: these guys rock... The CD's opening track, sounds akin to something that would be on the Fight Club soundtrack; if the Dust Brothers weren't in control. Maybe not so much Fight Club, but like, any good movie in which someone has a crashing realisation... Make no mistake; this is instrumental post-rock with attention grabbing orchestral construction... HC-B really are something special." Even In The Future Nothing Works

Excerpt: "it occurs to me this excellent instrumental, a taster of the forthcoming album, is like nothing so much as the exceptional band Morphine. Different too, of course. More jazz, baby. No vocals. But the smoky smack basement is evident in the almost elegiac horns atop the marshal beat, everyone in shades mourning and celebrating in the same moment. A glorious entrance to a wider world of HC-B." [sic]

Excerpt: "It opens with electronic noise, and ends as an almost classic triumphant anthem. And in between that you get a swarm of metallic bees, sound shaped by jazz-horns, a drum beat on speed and a heavy bass that slowly delivers the fanfare-like theme-line. Which sweeps you away completely... a massive piece of symphonic rock." Luna Kafe

Excerpt (translated from the Italian): "Working in work the Catania's band establishes and refines a creative identity. I knew them as authors of an experimental rock, between composition and free form, with strong appeals to progressive (the one who comes up with Blurt) and post rock. Then a passage of research and consolidation and now an effective trait d'union joins monochrome psychedelic rock and avant-garde material." Blow Up No. 71