Shardborne
Living Bridges

They hail from Limerick in Ireland, and they are releasing their first album this July, an album they call Living Bridges. It is said that their debut EP from 2011 was well received and now they have put together that long sought after album. An album with a very attractive cover artwork and I could probably buy it on vinyl just to get the artwork. But of course there is a musical artwork behind the painted one, and it is created by a quartet of guys where none is a singer. That of course means that the band is an instrumental rock band.

They build their music without being limited to fitting in the vocal parts meaning that they can build their songs a lot more complex and less structured. That is something that they do, it is guitar driven, complex and progressive. It also quite atmospheric, they create an interesting and adventurous mood to this album and unlike quite many bands of the instrumental rock/metal genre they build the songs around structures that feels completely built to be instrumental. Excellent production, the sound is great and I would actually describe the sound as being exactly as you imagine when looking at the cover artwork.

I have one small niggle with the album; I think they could have made it slightly shorter. All the tracks have parts that feel a bit slow and somewhat unnecessary and I think you could shorten the album a few minutes to make it feel a little bit more direct and exciting. I should point out that this is a little bit of nit-picking and that this doesn’t change the fact the fact that this is a great album, just maybe not as great as it could have been. The seven tracks have a playing time of just over 50 minutes and a fair bit of variation in both style and tempo, that should keep you interested for the entire playing time even though it could have been a little more dynamic as I previously pointed out.

It is a great album, the tracks are really strong and I don’t think any of them stand out from the others, as they are all very strong tracks. In the end there is nothing more to do than recommend the album to anyone who likes instrumental rock/metal, or the progressive varieties of the same genres – in fact I think that most of our readers will enjoy this album so it can be an album well worth checking out.

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