Review | Album review: Swedish post-rockers pg.lost ditch the vocals but maintain the foreboding

pg.lost
Versus
Pelagic Records

Although most of Versus, the fantastic new album from Swedish post-rock four piece pg.lost, was written in fragments, as band members swap­ped ideas online, the title is less about a relationship between irreconcil­able entities and mostly, according to guitarist Gustav Almberg, “a reflection of today’s society that seems to get more and more polarised”. Their sixth long player, and the follow-up to 2012’s split album with Dalian’s Wang Wen, has a more cinematic atmos­phere, the band’s trademark effect-saturated vocals having practically disap­peared and the void filled by crushing waves of synths. Thankfully for math-rock fans, and the band’s growing Asian fan base, who will no doubt be packing Kwun Tong’s Hidden Agenda on September 1, the dark and monumentally heavy orchestral instrumentals still throb with a foreboding beauty. Much like sonic peers Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky, pg.lost create haunting soundscapes through the rise and fall of dense percussion and intricate guitar play, and while they have some­times lost their way, here they have achieved a harmonious balance.