Harrisonburg, Virginia’s Gifts from Enola have had one of the toughest jobs in music for the past several years. Upon deciding to become an instrumental band prior to 2006, the six members entered one of the most whispered genres found in music today. To combine a lack of vocals with a uniquely niche sound now virtually guarantees a passionate overnight  cult following - replete with gaudy special edition vinyl releases, haughty party name drops, and fans that will virtually pray during your live performances. However, miss the mark or make a copycat and you’ll be laudably passed into an obscurity that even mainstream one-hit-wonders would pity. GFE seemed fully aware when releasing oh-six’s Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind, an album that was at once so post-metal and fresh in the style of freshmen that it seemed like it could have created itself. This is precisely the sort of group you would expect to fall victim to the oft-spoken “sophomore slump,” but come June, the band’s second album From Fathoms will likely silence many doubts about their candor.

What lacked on Loyal Eyes has clearly been addressed on From Fathoms. The album opens with in a way that’s become so commonplace it must be loved, a gentle guitar strum softly ushers in a quick porcelain guitar lead before exploding into orchestrated madness. “Benthos” is the perfect choice among the album’s eight songs for an opener; it foreshadows the new tightness and courage the band has reigned in, as well as succinctly summarizing most of the elements of the music that can be expected by new listeners. What follows is a five minute lecture from the band on exactly why you should have a new found respect for what they’ve been working on. No matter what your current activity, ears will perk at the opening minute of second track “Weightless Frame”: no instrumental fan would deny its beauty. Skipping a note by note description, the song instantly combines the best parts of God is an Astronaut with 65daysofstatic, but with a twist: halfway the song smoothly hits the breaks and devolves into a calm and sparkling folk mood reminiscent of something off Doves' Lost Souls.

If Gifts from Enola were an author and “Weightless Frame” the title of its bestselling book of short stories, then fourth track “Trieste“ is its magnum opus. The song begins slowly and wanders along, gaining momentum in bursts of the band's signature sounds of post-rock mixed with backing metal guitar. Over twice the duration of anything else on the album, it has the effect of making the listener highly impressed with the succession of songs before realizing that it’s a single track. This one song is a play in three acts, three dramatic and distinct parts that return to a morphing central riff and drum combination over low-volume guttural vocals. Every part of the band’s oeuvre is contained in what can hardly be denied is a truly epic instrumental effort. If you weren’t sold on the talent by this point, the band will have your attention afterward.

For fans of the original album, several things have been altered in creating this newer/shinier GFE. A browse over the track listing quickly reveals a trend towards brevity that is somewhat disappointing compared to their debut. Titles like “We Watched Them Lose Our Minds” and “Screaming at Anything That Moved” on the first album are here replaced by more nondescript track names - “Aves”, “Resurface”, “Melted Wings”. After several listens, it seems as though the creativity put into naming the tracks has on this second album been put into playing them; any fan of the first album’s “In the Company of Others” has noticed the glaring off-key tendencies of the backup guitarist. That’s gone now, each member seeming to have practiced his individual role thoroughly in preparing for a much stronger combined effort. There is more patience on this second album as well, more calm and beautiful parts that don’t sound forced at all, but instead serve to highlight the heavier riffs that serve as the band’s foundation. “Melted Wings”, in fact, is nearly six minutes of mostly gorgeous acoustic play finished off by a solid post-rock breakdown.

There is little to no reason not to thoroughly explore From Fathoms from beginning to end. There are two types of extremes when it comes to instrumental music fans: those that cling heavily to the staple sounds of the genre and those that appreciate quite a bit of deviance from them. Paradoxically, GFE  satisfy the needs of both these preferences by continuing on the road they set down on Loyal Eyes with a giant heart ready to break even their own rules. The record isn’t flawless - some strangely placed nineties garage riffs anchor “Weightless Thought” despite the song’s overall listenability. The metalesque vocals are sometimes spot-on in their low rumbling quality (and always set fairly far in the background, a great production decision here), but other times they have a "cute" quality that gives away the college student identity from which they come. Repeated visits to this massive house that Gifts from Enola have built will undoubtedly lead the average person to admire the rest of its gorgeous architecture and not its aesthetic flaws.

-Brendan Kraft