The more I discover about the local NZ music scene, the more impressed I am by the quality and diversity of what is available down here. Shepherds Of Cassini are another case in point. Hailing from Auckland they were formed in 2012 by Omar Al-Hashimi on drums (from Pilgrim’s Pyre), Vitesh Bava on bass (from Pilgrim’s Pyre), Felix Lun on electric violin (from An Emerald City) and Brendan Zwaan on guitar and vocals (from Flood). Imagine if you will Ozric Tentacles using violin instead of wind, and bringing in stoner elements as they experiment with sound, then you may come close. Of course you need to add to that list the tribal rhythms and especially the middle eastern influences and then you may get somewhere close.
The first time I played this not only did I not understand what I was really listening to, I actually didn’t like it at all. The songs often were over-long (“Eyelid” is eighteen minutes), I couldn’t work out why I was playing it (apart from being asked to) and it just didn’t work. But, I determined that the fault was probably with me as opposed to the music, especially as I kept hearing good things about them in the scene, so I persevered, and it was only on the third time through that it started to make sense. From there on in every play has just cemented my view that this is an incredible piece of work in so many ways. For the most part this is pure instrumental, and sounds as if the guys were playing this live in the studio, working with each other and bouncing ideas. Instead of being too long, the songs were now too short, and the simple almost naïve complexity really brought me in. I’m not overly sure of the drums sound, as to my hearing the snare is too high in the mix, but that really is just being picky.
This is never going to be an immediate album, but is definitely worth persevering with, and can be streamed from Bandcamp before purchase so if you want to try something that is definitely more than a little different then this may well be for you.
shepherdsofcassini.bandcamp.com
