The Seven Mile Journey are a four-piece post-rock outfit hailing from Denmark, and this debut album has apparently been seven years in the making, with the band inhabiting similar epic and majestic territory to the likes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Tortoise. Indeed the comparatively stripped-back two guitar, drums and bass set-up may have some making associations more with Explosions In The Sky.
Running at just over 42 minutes and comprised of just four individual tracks (two of them stretching to 15 minutes), ‘The Journey Studies’ shows The Seven Mile Journey constructing deeply enveloping passages that develop through alternating moods of dark intensity, delicate contemplative beauty and majestic rock-out in a manner that’s sure to be familiar to anyone who’s got a few Thrill Jockey records in their collection. In this case, it’s extremely difficult to pick any real faults in Seven Mile Journey’s deft balance of dynamism and restraint, apart from that ‘Journey Studies’ perhaps shows the band treading through areas of the post-rock canon that have been exhaustively mapped out and now offer diminishing surprises. An extremely strong debut, but perhaps slightly over-familiar.
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