Reserve de Marche – The Last Twenty Years (2012)

Making its way from Russia (literarily), today we have Reserve de Marche and their excellent combination of Progressive Rock with Post-Rock/Metal elements. With their releases titled “The Last Twenty Years”, the band delivers a very cinematic musical experience that covers many genres and will spawn many different images and landscaped in the listeners head.

With the opener “Calorie” the mood is set very mellow and ethereal. The band chooses to deliver a calmer Post-Rock/Metal track that features excellent percussions and very well defined guitar lines. The atmosphere is very playful and with some superb progressive elements. “Le Garage” rips through with some crunchy Sludgy guitars, giving the music a completely different look than on the first track. This ‘aggression’ is nicely alternated by some progressive percussions and interesting tempo changes. So far, the band has shown great ability for combining genres, and has kept the momentum going with two very different, but equally exciting tracks.

Showcasing more Post-Rock/Metal skills with progressive excellence infused, “Forest of Maniac” and “Iron Flow” delivers a combined 17 minutes of excellent music, propelling Reserve de Marche’s musical quality to extreme heights. Our favorite track in this release is the very dreamy “Song for Hedgehog” and its ethereal shoegaze-ish guitars. We love bands that use these type of sounds, and with the band’s excellent percussions on the back, they just sound outstanding.

Closing the release we have the excellent “Frozen Time” and its very dramatic mood. Providing a feeling of helplessness, we think that the band couldn’t have found a better closing track for such a powerful and well composed release. If you are looking for an excellent instrumental album with amazing music that never goes to the ‘musical masturbation’ extremes, but instead focuses on how well the songs work with each other and how catchy they are, look no further and get ‘The Last Twenty Years”. We highly recommend this album for fans of Cult of Luna, Tides of Nebula, and similar bands.

Release: May 20th, 2012

Genre: Post-Rock/Metal

Country: Russia