Album: Broken Cities - Anemoi

Band: Broken Cities
Album: Anemoi
Label: Self Released
Year: 2014

Tracklist
01. Voyage Of The Anemoi
02. Approaching Luna
03. Breach
04. ...Or We Will Bring Doom
05. Beyond the Lightning, Void
06. The Nothing
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Broken Cities is a self-produced, five-piece post-rock band from Oakland, CA. The music explores timbre and dynamics while pursuing a melodic narrative of other-worldly soundscapes. All of Broken Cities' music is released under a generous "pay-what-you-want" system, and is Creative Commons licensed to encourage re-use and remixing.

Their first album is imbued with crescendos and richly layered with reverb-laden guitars swirling around melodic pianos, deep drum rolls and crashing cymbals (think Mono, Explosions In The Sky, Sigur Rós, Do Make Say Think and minimalist composers like Steve Reich). At the time, the band consisted of only two members, Nick Zomkowski and Tony Lowe, who shouldered all the duties of releasing a record, themselves - from writing the songs, to mixing, engineering and mastering everything - in short, DIY in its most literal sense.

Their follow-up EP, Parable, found Broken Cities bigger in every way, except track count. The band had grown (there are now five members) not only in number but in musical understanding and sound exploration. The songs were larger on this release, with more open space to create greater suspense and intensity with far more rewarding build-ups. Broken Cities' has matured from new band to ambitious explorers of other-worldly soundscapes where music is the sole vessel by which to enter or exit these new worlds.

Broken Cities has now completed their third release, a full length album titled Anemoi. It’s 6 tracks bring the quintet to completely new horizons, exploring the depths of our cosmos through sound and raw, gritty passion. This work finds them having emerged from a cocoon of growth, delivering epic, cinematic journeys through blistering, tension filled tracks and contemplative valleys replete with glockenspiel and reverb-laden guitar beds.