Release Date: September 14th 2010
Genre: Instrumental
Label: Friction Records
MySpace:www.myspace.com/charlestheosprey
 

The lyrics of a song provide a view into the soul of the music itself. The words can be interpreted as the listener wishes, but they were first written for a selfish purpose. However, while most lyrics may be entirely compelling in their own right, it is always the voiceless music that will come across as the most confusing, the most troubling, and, over all, the most interesting.

Charles the Osprey is the first band I have heard compose instrumental music that does not sound like it was recorded to use as a backing track. To create music that has the ability to stand entirely on its own requires a liberal dose of courage, and such a bravery is perfectly projected in the opening of Consider, “Scimitar Children and Their Rugs”. The album begins simply, with unassuming  guitar plucking and a jungle of a drum beat, but soon it explodes into thunderous mechanics, growing ever more intimidating by each passing strike of the drum.

The rather schizophrenic “Lipstick with Bull Tendencies” is a spiral of indecision – about seven songs condensed into one dry-swallow pill. The illness in question sparks like erratic fireworks behind the eyelids, and the music seems to pull at the mind, nagging and throbbing, much like a disease itself.

“The Idirian-Culture War” makes itself known with an anxious plucking, and with it you  can envision yourself balancing on a tightrope, suspended across a sea of needles, desperately struggling to keep any kind of stability. Soon melodic drum crashes send you falling, losing your footing on the thread-thin rope.

“The Frontal Lobe A Go-Go” enjoys so many muffled trips in beat and wrenches in mood that it could well be a soundtrack to a new-age silent film for hopeless youth. Its swings in emotion, from rage to passion and from glee to despair, could be used to illustrate the most abstract reality of a person’s life.

Eye-twitching insomnia comes in the form of “Gideon’s Hyper Extension and Aftermath,” where in the bloops and bleeps of the music you can very nearly feel fingers smashing game controller keys as colours of all angles of the spectrum come zooming out of a tiny TV screen to provide a light show around the halo of the restless subject.

The final strike of Charles the Osprey sees the conclusion of the mind-easing interludes that occured just twice throughout the album. The closing track, “Conversations with the Deacon Vol. III”,  sees an ocean of metallic ringings and echoing chords float into the exerted and exhausted mind of the attentive listener. It is nothing short of beautiful in its calmness, even as it diminshes into a hairbrained yowling, kicking, and ripping. This devilish spiralling end culminates with a single stir of manical laughter.

Consider is, without a shadow of a doubt, a prolonged experience. It appears to me now, after a rigorous amount of time spent listening to it, that lyrics make a song appear to pass faster. The attractive babblings keep our minds ticking over at ease, but when it is a sea of pure noise, all your energies are taken and lead into the audio, be it a voluntary action or not. Charles the Osprey’s LP feels as if it’s portraying classical music to the modern generation whose attention span has been limited by the two minute twirpings of 8 bit autotunes.

While there is an unfortunately slim chance of Charles the Osprey’s phenomenal music to ever transcend to a mainstream crowd, it is widely known that the best beasts are kept in the basement, and that violent silence is eternally golden.