- Sadglint is Rohan Cooper, a guy I could know more about. What little I do is good, at least. If just about the only thing that comes up on the interwebs about you is a testimonial from Bigstrongbrute, you're probably doing OK. Rohan has been chipping in for ages on Bigstrongbrute stuff but has finally struck out on his own. According to Mr. Brute, “it's one of the best things you'll hear all year.”
Well, then, although we don't have much else we do have the debut, self-titled five track EP to which he's referring. In just those five cuts it proves to be surprisingly diverse, especially since Rohan is clearly a quiet and restrained kind of guy.
This is made clear as we ghost into the opening and title track, again, it's Sadglint. Calling a song after yourself imbues it with a certain significance, don't you agree? If this is some kind of mission-statement, you could certainly do worse. An echoing voice and lingering fragments of acoustic guitar float atmospherically, ever so slowly coalescing into the rhythmic pattern which begins to gather these elements and forge them into the driving beat of this song. It's like post-rock, but filtered through the most serene ambient music. Like post-rock it builds to quite the climax, even trumpets and saxophones start to peal out over the top.
The oddly placed Overture throws out those pretensions to post-rock and dives into ambience that, if it were louder, would melt your ears, but its titanic dimensions maintain their distance, like mountains seen through a haze. Cold Hands returns to the post-rock recipe, with less of the ambient wandering, but still whisper quiet, just like Rohan's voice, which scratches and creeps over the track like Thom Yorke at his most introspective. It morphes into a steady acoustic guitar-strum that is surprisingly upbeat. It's so irrepressibly warm that it can't resist breaking out into horns again, just for a little bit at the end.
The EP's final two numbers change course again, Into Your Arms keeps only the ghostly vocal and acoustic strumming for a simple, meandering folk. Finally, Timbre Shakes adds an organ shimmer and beat to create an ethereal indie-folk-rock. Funnily enough, it's the most marketable thing here. Not that I would want to, but if you traded in the enormously cloudy production sound for something much crisper, you'd probably find something that the kids out there would flock to in droves.
With such diversity and carefully structured combinations of sounds, Sadglint doesn't get boring and it makes me excited to see what would happen at album length. As it is, I'm probably a bit too old and distinguished to 'flock' to anything, but, with a certain dignity, I'm undeniably enjoying what Sadglint brings to the table.

- Chris Cobcroft.