Tangled Thoughts of Leaving – Oscillating Forest (Review)

Tangled Thoughts of Leaving are an Australian post-rock/metal band, and this is their fourth album.

Despite there being many great instrumental bands out there, I’m always put off listening to a band when there’s no vocalist. I’m well aware that this is my loss, but I can’t usually help it. However, there have certainly been many exceptions over the years to this, and Tangled Thoughts of Leaving are definitely one of them.

Oscillating Forest is a multifaceted and highly textured piece of work. It uses a loose framework of post-rock/metal in atypical ways to craft tapestries of sound that consist of all manner of different elements, styles, sounds, and genres. Rock, doom, noise, jazz, experimental, progressive – whatever sort of musical tag you want to apply to Oscillating Forest, it’s a feast of varied, well-crafted music that contains multitudes of coexisting styles and genres within its 62 minutes.

Presenting as a sort of patchwork experimental cinematic experience set across eleven separate-yet-linked tracks, Oscillating Forest ebbs and flows with organic ease through its running time. It’s unpredictable and detailed, building a long-form expressive soundscape that traverses through a diverse range of feelings, moods, and atmospheres. Whether beautifully immersive, hauntingly desolate, unbearably harsh, or any number of other modes of being, Oscillating Forest is nothing if not compelling and engaging throughout.

Oscillating Forest offers a musical journey different to most. Tangled Thoughts of Leaving have created an absorbing experience that transports the listener away to a realm of both hostility and wonder. One note of warning though – in places Oscillating Forest delves deep into experimental and free-form improvisational waters, so it’s not necessarily the easiest of listens at all times, but then it’s not meant to be. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and so is Oscillating Forest.

Very highly recommended.