Sans Trauma - Rushing Your Dragon
A tricky beast to get your lugs around at first, but once it infiltrates those eardrums it's quite a triumph
To a pigeon-hole pushing hack, Sans Trauma are a cantankerous swine of a band to pin down. The Edinburgh quartet’s debut mini-LP Rushing your Dragon transcends myriad genres to arrive at something that roughly translates as a medley of shoe-gaze, post-rock and folk, yet it's sonically so very much more. Gauzy, misty-eyed melodics flutter through the spine of this gently persuasive longplayer, with tender vocals straining between the spider-webbed cluster of strum and drum that harnesses opening number Day 1 Woke Up and the cooing twinkle of Late Nights In Estate Rooms. Such brittle moments are the fulcrum of the record’s deep-seated emotional well, but in the spoken word brilliance of I Left Her One Day or Costa Cana’s incessant chamber-tronica lies an underbelly ablaze with vigour and bite. Certainly, Rushing Your Dragon is - at least initially - a tricky beast to get your lugs around, but once it infiltrates those eardrums it's quite a triumph. [Billy Hamilton]