Some pretty harmless lo-fi guitar meanderings from one Ryan Cockburn. The kind of pleasant, drifting investigations that aren?t offensive enough to register complaint but still don?t actively do enough to get you interested. A recording of some rain pops up at the start of ?Hearth for a Grave?, receding into whisps of slow-glowing fuzz guitar and delicate percussive sparks, there?s some drones, a terribly recorded drum-kit, and then the rain creeps back in. I honestly have no idea why people keep using rain on their music. Who started this? Was it Black Sabbath? ?Hearth for a Grave? is actually quite enjoyable in a sultry, kaleidoscopic feedback drone kind of way, especially when Cockburn picks up the pace towards the end and tapers off into a curl of harmonic feedback, rising into a final flourish of reverb-drenched clatter. But then you?ve got another minute and half of RAIN to deal with, as if the ambiance needs to be confirmed by some clumsy natural juxtaposition. For most of the fourth track a cymbal is tapped. Most of these tracks seem to be filler for the main event, in each case a painful and staggeringly slow fadeout that borders on the sanctimonious. There a few nice touches here, some of the drones creep around pleasantly enough and the guitar work is competent, but this would have been far more appetising had there been even a whiff of self-deprecation apparent, instead of the weird arrogance of approach that seems to want to instil every clunk with meaning and association. Then again, this is dedicated to Cockburn?s mother, so maybe I?m just missing the point. The last track bobs around with some nice resonant metal undercut by a fuzz-line that develops somewhere, something, but gets pretty boring, whoomph and then a crescendo of clang until it ends ? but at least it does so with a straight cut this time, saving us from another endless fadeout. Passable at best. 4/10 -- Evan Rhodes (20 May, 2008)