I doubt this was the actual initiation point for their EP's title, but the line "The space that's in between insane and insecure," from Green Day's monument to mallpunk entropy, "Jesus of Suburbia," is not a bad place to start a discussion of a band that does their darnedest to alloy Deftones with Thursday at a time when "mall culture" is still alive and well, but only on the internet- thriving in the form of image macro moodboard / "starter packs" and in the dreams of goth girls once they've tucked their wings in for the night. It's insane that a group like Post Heaven out of Melbourne can sound so spiritually akin to so many alt. chart climbers from an era where tracking charts and finding a band's t-shirt on the wall at Hot Topic meant that they had really "made it," and it makes me feel a little insecure reaching that far back into the vault of my recollection to retrieve ancient cultural context to make sense of their music from an epoch when I was seriously considering lifestyle choices such as acquiring a lip ring and wearing eyeliner to family functions to prove my iNDiVIdUALitY (thankfully, wisdom prevailed on both fronts). I don't know for certain how people younger than me (or anyone really) are discovering music these days (the algo is really serving up hot dog crap to me as of late, and I'm sure it's the same for others), but I'd like to think that if they had been around back in the day, that I would have seen Post Heaven's name on a flyer next to the register at a Spencer's Gifts, and had the clarity of mind to encode their name into my memory long enough to check their Myspace page when I got home. I also like to imagine that I'd have the wherewithal at that tender age to appreciate that they essentially start their EP, The Space That's In Between, with what should be the final song, "End Alone," a slow-burning, melancholic sonnet, where lamentations twirl atop a delicately paced piano melody like a flower petal on the surface of a still pond, allowing tension to build until it tumbles over into a tempest's pot of dissonant distortion and soul-rattling echoes of inner carnage and the rancor of requiem. This opener, while seemingly a purpose-built farewell, permits you to bid adieu to your inhibitions in preparation for the following track, "Basic Fault," an iron-clawed little wolverine that treats your head like a soft hill of alpine earth, cracking the seal on your dome as if it were a rotten log and burrowing into the pink peat of your insides with a martyr-making, slash-and-claw combo of interlocking grooves which make way to fill the space they've opened up with the fog of scorched bridges and a resigned, red-wet trickle of heartache. "Exit Wound" follows, and as the EP's most immediately impactful track, it punches through the thin membrane of the ledge that the previous two songs had walked you out onto, pushing you to plunge into a perilous free fall, like Alice in pursuit of the White Rabbit, only the portal you find yourself gliding down is lined with sharp protrusions of shattered memories and portraits of the happy life you never managed to attain, painful reminders of what could never be as you drift down a well of sorrow. Finally, "Hesitation Love" grants you a soft landing in a quickly emptying hourglass of quicksand that pulls you down into a confluence of claustrophobic regret and the devourment of unappeased desire. Somewhere between here and a boulevard of broken dreams, lies the hope that Post Heaven's message and sound will reach you in time to remind you of better days before the delirium of your circumstances and consumption of your contritions swallow you whole.
