I always appreciate it when post-hardcore bands approach each song like it's an abstract art piece, and that's where I think Seattle's Lowe Cellar is coming from on their LP, TAGU. Every lyric, every riff, and each gripping groove is meant to exhaust your interpretive dexterity and pull you into a resonant headspace with as much depth to be explored as the Earth's Lithosphere. Lowe Cellar often sounds potent and dire without giving way to overt aggression or tipping the scales into sheer chaos, preferring to build elaborate continuities of tension with unexpected payoffs that are as sweetly melancholy as an unturned sundae left out in the rain. While maintaining a protracted distance from direct expressions of mood and social observances, they meticulously nurture a ripe intellectual peat from which elucidatory explorations may blossom- they can really write a hook too! As much as Lowe Cellar take after hyper-expressive and adventurous emo bands and burning-heart Prometheans like Cursive and mewithoutYou, there is also a playful elasticity to them that I would hazard to attribute to some preoccupation with Built to Spill, as well as a fundamental pop orientation that is roughly aligned with '90s indie jangle jockeys like The Posies and Velvet Crush. That is to say, that as much as these guys get into their own heads on this record (and help you draw into your own), they never shrink so far away from the light of accessibility that they eschew enjoyability for the purely evokative.
Not as much of a pariah as you'd think (Outcast Tapes Infirmary).