Music comes in a whole lot of forms when it comes down to it. Some music cheerfully bops along with a nice verse-chorus format, tailor-made to produce earworms. Some is ornate, featuring a multitude of movements or flurries of frenetic technicality. And sometimes, music exists to just melt into, inviting you to tune into its wavelength and follow along as it pulls you through meditative sonic landscapes. Parisians Bank Myna are most assuredly a fine example of that latter approach, and on their new album EIMURIA, the landscapes are grand indeed.
I walked into EIMURIA practically blind to Bank Myna‘s approach, but over my time with the album I’ve become quite enamored of the band’s approach to droning and occasionally crushing post-rock. Their sound wouldn’t be unfamiliar to post-rock fans, using guitar and violin to carve long, simple but evocative passages over the pulse of bass and drums. At any time, their compositions may be as sparse as a single instrument and Maud Harribey’s powerful voice or as dense as the full band coming down in slabs of doom metal. Bank Myna‘s specific iteration of post-rock is noticeably ritualistic in attitude, and it makes for an album that is extremely easy to get lost in.
It helps, too, that EIMURIA is pleasantly varied across its runtime. After the bassy distortion that heralds the album on “No Ocean of Thoughts”, the band kicks right into gear with the near 13-minute “The Shadowed Body”. Across the track’s lengthy runtime, the band builds several intense peaks and serene valleys through their music, featuring a shift around 2/3rds of the way in that had me checking if the track had changed at least once. The songs’ multiple builds burn to a point of unsettling intensity towards the tracks end, before calmly releasing to the following track. Later, closer “L’Implorante” feels even more expansive, with a slow burn intro of distorted strings drifting like clouds around the vocals. Several minutes in, a bassline that evokes Om in its hypnotic focus emerges driving the track along under shimmering chords, building to searing intensity as it stretches towards the album’s conclusion.
Sandwiched between those monoliths are two tracks that may have sat with me even better in the long run. “The Other Faceless Me” begins quietly with soft swells of guitar and violin accompanying the singing, augmented later by a meditative drum pattern and building distortion. Then the tension releases into shimmering guitars with a Western twang, almost recalling latter-day Earth, making for one of my favorite moments across the album. Meanwhile, “Burn All the Edges” (which Everything Is Noise premiered here) kicks off in the album’s doomiest fashion with heavy chords coming down in slabs before quieting down to a section featuring what could count as a clean riff, swelling back into intensity before the track’s terminus.
And the thing of it is, none of that nuts-and-bolts description properly evokes the desert-like, almost mystical atmosphere Bank Myna conjures across EIMURIA. The musicianship is constantly engrossing even at its most simplistic, while the singing ranges from intimate croons to impassioned wails that feel like the utterings of a mad seer. I name-dropped Earth and Om specifically earlier because Bank Myna does a better job matching up to their religious vibes than almost anything I’ve heard in quite some time, and even if they’re a bit more frenetic and intense than those earlier bands, they still utterly succeed in crafting that all-too-rare feeling.
EIMURIA was an album I approached with no expectations, and even fighting against doing my listening in the wrong mindset and my own attention span (which wouldn’t be envied in the standard fishbowl), Bank Myna had me deeply engrossed practically every moment. Their ritualistic approach to doomy post-rock was an absolute delight, and I could see EIMURIA being a perfect soundtrack to a long drive or some aided meditation. It’s not music to be thrown on at just any time, and you won’t find too many catchy hooks or raw displays of technical ability. But when you just want to dissolve into an album, Bank Myna can most assuredly lend you a hand and the right atmosphere here.
