I’ll never forget the first time I heard Mogwai: it was late spring of 1999 and I was living in Toronto.  I walked into Rotate This! downtown on Queen St. W to purchase Aloha’s …The Nonbelievers EP and sift through the racks for anything else of interest.  CODY had just been released a while earlier and the shopkeep had what I later learned was the song Kappa pumping through the store.  I remember being completely captivated by this sound that I’d never heard before.  I went up to the counter with my Aloha record and asked for a copy of whatever it was that was being played.  And my love for post-rock was born.  As for Aloha, I don’t think I cracked the cellophane for a good week.  It was all Mogwai all the time.  CODY, still to this day, gets its fair share of rotation and remains one of my favorite albums of all time.

Ten years and hundreds of records later, cue up Austin’s latest post-rock wonder-group The Calm Blue Sea.

The reason for my little Mogwai story is this: I couldn’t tell you when, where, or how I first came across The Calm Blue Sea.  I remember being completely taken by the album’s interplay between massive and minuscule, but can recall little else.  Seems anti-climactic in comparison, which is exactly my point.  I fell for this album hard at first — like a horned up college kid stricken with puppy love for a bar nymph.  I was even ready to offer toast the next morning.  But once the sun rose and the blood alcohol returned to normal levels, so to speak, I couldn’t help but feel that I wasn’t the first to have been so easily seduced.

Don’t get me wrong — this is a stunning debut from a band that I absolutely look forward to hearing more from in the future.  They’ve built upon the template laid before them by their Austin contemporaries Explosions in the Sky so perfectly, that I dare say they actually sound better at times.  But that’s precisely the problem for me.  Everything I hear on the album is familiar in one way or another — like I’ve owned it for years and am just blowing off the dust after a lengthy recess.  It’s unfair, really.  Songs of this caliber deserve better.

The Calm Blue Sea have shown me with this release that they are more than capable of producing near textbook examples of everything a post-rock record should aspire to be.  What’s missing is that certain signature, that identifiable nuance to elevate The Calm Blue Sea from exemplary to essential.  Whatever that may be, I sincerely hope that we all find it on subsequent installments from the band because one thing is for certain — rarely is anyone ever remembered for writing textbooks.