Foxhole - We the Wintering Tree

Genre indie-rock Publisher Burnt Toast Vinyl External Links Foxhole Website

Formed in Bowling Green, Kentucky back in the year 2000, Foxhole is an evolving group of musicians that churn out the sort of lush, instrumental suites that are most commonly classified as 'post-rock'. Sharing signifiers with bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai, We the Wintering Tree relies on an elegant mixture of cascading guitars, dreamy atmospherics, and precise percussion to populate their musical landscape. But in an interesting twist that separates them from many of the other post-rock also-rans, Foxhole ably weaves the winsome sounds of the trumpet into their tapestry. To be sure, other bands in this genre experiment with horns quite regularly, but by allowing a single orchestral instrument to play such a prominent role these guys have certainly fashioned a distinct vibe.

Wintering Tree, originally released in 2004 but being re-released by Burnt Toast thanks to wider interest in the band's recent Push/Pull EP, pulls the listener on a wandering, sometimes turbulent, journey throughout its' ten tracks. The album's opener, "A Series of Springs and Falls", eases us in with a deliberately strummed acoustic guitar layered with echo and reverb, slowly adding trumpet to the main melody and setting things up nicely for what is to follow. "The End of Dying" swerves to a darker side of the road with prominent drums holding down the middle between two guitar lines battling it out via opposite stereo channels. In addition to exploring the interplay between quiet and loud dynamics common to a vast majority of post-rock bands, Foxhole does an excellent job of adding and subtracting layers to heighten, or deflate as needed, the album's sense of drama. "Dead Rimes" and "Lamentations" are both excellent examples of this technique, particularly the way everything drops out of "Rimes" to leave us with a solitary guitar line fading to chirping birds and chiming bells.

Despite being an album so epic in scope and range, the true beauty and power is revealed in a variety of singular moments. "A Children's Canto" relies heavily on ambient field recordings of children's voices and a thin, obscured vocal melody for texture, but the songs' best trick occurs when everything slows down to a virtual crawl before exploding in a final climax. Another standout moment occurs about three minutes into "At Right Angles" when dramatic, staccato guitar stabs set up a chaotic conclusion broken up only by a lonesome trumpet melody. The conflict between these disparate elements gives the track its' emotional heft and beauty. All of this internal tension and release is capped by a very fitting conclusion in "Through Bone and Marrow", which sends slow and steady waves of calming sound to wash out the preceding turbulence. It allows the album to end on such a quiet note that you can clearly hear the scraping of fingers over the guitar strings.

Which brings up one of the strongest assets of Wintering Tree beyond the musicianship of the members of Foxhole, the intimate production. The album was recorded in an empty church sanctuary, allowing the music to have the depth and warmth it needed to grow and breathe. In addition to the scrape of the guitar strings mentioned above, a careful listener can hear the faint echo as instruments fade out as well as the rattle of the drum heads when things get particularly loud. Even during the most tumultuous moments, this intimacy allows the listener to feel embraced by the music.

Foxhole doesn't break a whole lot of new ground throughout the course of Wintering Tree, but the warm production and the excellent incorporation of the trumpet keeps things fresh enough to make it worth a listen for any fan of instrumental rock. They are also a relatively young act slowly coming into their own, so grab this re-release and jump on board before the next full-length inevitably brings them to an even wider audience.