de la mancha: end of music

This is the second full-length album by Swedish group De La Mancha. At the core of the band are two childhood friends Jerker Lund and Dag Rosenqvist, who founded the project back in 2003. A shared admiration for groups like Red House Painters, Sigur Rós, Led Zeppelin and My Bloody Valentine set out a general direction for the duo. And the band has stayed true to this tradition of leftfield pop-rock as The End Of Music demonstrates most perfectly. The album dives in at the deep end with a brief intro, "Golden Bells," which flows seamlessly into the straight-up rocking number, "Ursa Minor." "Under A Leaden Sky" is an epic orchestral ballad with strong dynamics. Again, De La Mancha whose first release was an EP on Crying Bob Records in 2005, show their tremendous musical versatility on "Hidden Mountains," which quickly melts into a symphonic drone midway before tightening the reigns again at the very end, returning to the main refrain of the song. "Willow Lane" features a stripped-down arrangement of piano, vocals and organ -- as powerful as any rock number. Equally fragile in its beauty is the somber composition, "Erase." The song also relies, for the most part, on a very sparse instrumentation, but puts this to great effect. "At Lands End" clocks in at over 9 minutes -- the longest track on the album. The End Of Music is an album full of contrast and beauty. Each track has a clear identity and both the song-writing process as well as the production have been meticulously executed by Lund and Rosenqvist.