Marie is the second release from Dayton, Ohio quartet Romance of Young Tigers. Never ones for cheap packaging, the EP has been released in two forms, both of which are hand made and packaged by guitarist Seth Graham. One version comes in a small blue wooden box painted with artwork, and the other CDs reside in green, brown, or black colored burlap bags. Each package comes with the CD as well as a torn section of a weathered looking map. Only sixty of each variety are available; however, the band plans to release a vinyl version hand made with the same attention to detail AND including a hand printed poster.

The EP contains two tracks aptly titled “Marie Part 1 and 2,” each stretching over fifteen minutes in length. The first three minutes of "Part 1" start with a barely audible mix of feedback, reversed guitar, and static noise. While the dynamics slowly build over the next five minutes, multiple layers of both reversed and clean, rapidly plucked guitar are added. Curiously, the static and ambient noise is very loud while all the guitar parts sound buried in the mix. The song reaches a pseudo-climax around nine minutes in, then it fades out with much more static noise. With four minutes left, everything drops out, and all that remains is muted sounding feedback and drones. “Marie Part 2” begins with the same couple minutes of barely audible sounds which are then followed by waves of feedback, swelling guitar, quickly picked high notes and rumbling noises. The rest of the song is similar to the first, containing both a pseudo-climax and four minutes of nothingness at the end. This release lacks the structure and immediacy that the band’s first EP, I Have Supped Full on Horrors, demonstrated so well. 

On Romance of Young Tigers’ first release the band played slowly moving, guitar driven post-rock similar to Mono. Since then, it seems that they have deconstructed their sound while forgetting one of its most important aspects - the strong sense of melody. The music on the first EP moved at nearly the same glacial pace, but underneath all the layers of distortion, the songs were being driven by melody. The problem I have with Marie is that the melodies, if any, are extremely loose and don’t really go anywhere. The remaining ambient type music is decent, but not nearly as moving or interesting to listen to as the band’s prior output.

-Brenton Dwyer