The Bloom / The Blossom

Not entirely sure the first track justifies not just being 2 tracks (beyond the implicit ambient music requirement of at least 4 tracks over 10 minutes I suppose), but this is overall a really solid piece of work. It's a bit more involved than I anticipated, to the point where I think I'd call it closer to post-rock and shoegaze, but the soundscapes are rich and the building up of every element through repetition as the tracks build feels consistently absorbing without being too rigid and repetitive. At it's best, it reminded me a lot of some of 65daysofstatic's No Man's Sky soundtrack. I could definitely the second half of the record being a little more hit or miss than the first, as it moves into a more complex and technically involved rocky sound, but personally that was the half I preferred, as I thought some songs in the first half, especially with the track Nessuifunshutsukō, stretched themselves a bit too long just for the sake of it.