Why? This question is one that predominates all of my thoughts on Hieroglyphics. I honestly try to not let anything but the music itself color my opinion. Things like genre pigeon-holing, over-popularity, too much buzz or too much hype - I try to transcend these things when I listen to music. But there are just way too many eyebrow-raising absurdities involved with this album to not mention them, or even to have them not be influential.

First there is the name. Theyageletters. OK. The Yage Letters also happens to be the published moniker of the letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg when Burroughs went down to South America to try to find Yage in order to kick junk. Yage is an analogous term for ayahuasca, the DMT infused ceremonial brew of the Amazon basin. Why give your band such a title? I don't know. Their sound certainly isn't anywhere near all the disappointed psych bands that wish they secured that name. But the strange name choices don't end there. Each name of the tracks on the album reflects the number in which the tracks appear. So, for example, track three is called "Three Kings" and track six is called "Sixth Sense." Yea, have you caught that yet? The number thing is lame enough, but each track is also named after a movie with a number in the title! Right down to the last track called "Se7en." Why, in God's good name, you would want to associate each track with a movie, I honestly don't know.

So what's in a name? As far as the music itself goes, we are talking generic post-rock with flourishes of generic metalish-type-interludes. So with their instrumental tracks wide open to interpretation, I don't understand why you would make me want to think of how this song may or may not represent motifs in the movie Seven. The first track, "First Angel," the only track not named after a movie (though the credits in the liner notes call it "First Vampire," which is a movie), contains a bizarre spoken word piece in order to kick things off. In said piece, the lyricist actually uses the term "post-rock." As in, something along the lines of, "coming at you with their post-rock." It's bad enough when critics use the term (myself included). But why a band would want to associate themselves with it, I just don't know.

All that being said, I think the bassist is tops. For real. Other than that, I don't think there's much to sink one's teeth into on this album. The shortest track (aside from the spoken word intro) is nine minutes and the longest is fourteen. The problem is that the tracks feel as though they are long for the sake of being long. The content of this album mostly falls on either side of the line between pretension and just plain old goofiness. You aural attention would be better spent elsewhere.

-Mike Lutomski