Do Make Say Think - Other Truths (Arts & Crafts, 2009)

Breaking through in the early 2000s as part of the third wave of post-rock, Toronto's mostly instrumental outfit Do Make Say Think have become a crown jewel of Canadian alternative rock and one of the most popular post-rock bands today.

DMST take self-titling to a whole new level on their sixth album Other Truths by naming the album’s four tracks "Do," Make," "Say" and "Think," respectively. Although Other Truths features the fewest number of songs on a Do Make album yet, brevity is not the adjective to describe this album. Other Truths is the band’s shortest album to date, but it still clocks in at approximately forty-three minutes.

Other Truths blasts off with the rocket-fueled "Do," as a gently finger-picked melody dabbed with audible fretboard-slides quickly gives way to a meteor shower of instruments. One by one, electric guitars, bass and increasingly thunderous drums plummet from the sky like space shrapnel burning up on re-entry. "Do" is gripping and overpowering; however, it essentially conforms to the false-finish/climax formula that typifies most post-rock.

The last three minutes of "Do" coast into the subtle drum-work of "Make" which may appeal to fans of the band’s earlier, more jazz-infused albums. Here, experimental folk-rockers Akron/Family reprise their role as vocalists from Do Make Say Think's previous album You, You're a History in Rust (still the only vocalists to ever appear on a DMST album), before "Make" skyrockets to uncharted territories.

"Make" concludes with a winding, horn-driven transition into "Say" where, in contrast to the epic brass battalion featured so prominently on the two previous tracks, determined drums direct a cast of doleful, climactic horns. The track’s dramatic sombreness works perfectly as a soundtrack to a band preparing for war, consciously marching in as underdogs.

As DMST enter an un-winnable situation, plaintive vocals lull the track to a quiet close, and the scene plays out in slow motion as it fades to black. From here, the quietest stretch on Other Truths begins and continues until the album ends. It is difficult to recall if DMST have ever sounded so distant, with such sparse, barely noticeable drums.

It took me a long time to like or even come to terms with Other Truths. The sudden change from torrential to introspective jarred me, and I was disappointed that the pace and mood seemed to have steadily declined after the first track. But the more I listened to Other Truths, the less the songs seemed to have been "stuck in middling positions, unsure of their courses" or "easily fade[d] into background music," as I’d had to backspace. Like a lot of other post-rock, Other Truths can be a little difficult to digest – even boring, at least upon the first few listens. But certainly as far as track and album lengths go, post-rock can get a lot worse than Other Truths.