Plying a sort of catchall, angular and jangly post rock/post hardcore that reminded me of instrumental acts like Sleeping In Gethsemane and Shelter Red, just with some screamed/wailed sung vocals and some injections of busy The Fall of Troy or Thursday style screamo spurts. Lost Apparitions are ambitious, but the end result is just too jumbled and fractured to have any lasting impression.

The brittle bursts of dissonance are far less satisfying than the bands tangents into acoustic, expansive ambience as heard on the tail end of better tracks like “Messages”, “I am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds” or the parts of “Where All Life Ends”. And frankly these guys would actually be a passable instrumental band as the vocals are actually pretty distracting- just check out the start of the otherwise shimmery “Progress and Knowledge”.

“Hypnogogia” ends the album with some pulsing ambience, and its still a little more preferable to the actual music that Lost Apparitions display for the most part and frankly this is an band I probably wont revist again, even if on a local label.

Despite calling themselves ‘progressive’, Estrus are a fairly typical band you’d see on the likes of Rise Records, Media Skare or Solid State Records; growly/screamy melodic metalcore with lots of clean vocals and synths and few ambient atmospheric moments thrown in (“Lights on the Path”, “Pripyat”, “The Defining Moments”). And other than some rather wimpy clean vocals, everything is actually pretty decently done with a nice developed sense of songwriting and dynamics that a par for the genre’s course.

The production values are solid, though not up there with the big boys yet, but the band does have the ability to bring something a little more introspective and intelligent to the genre not relying of cure or quirk song titles or breakdowns to carry the material. The keyboards are well placed and gloss the songs with a little sobering character here and there as bands like The Human Abstract and The Demonstration come to mind during songs like “The Abstract”, “The Day of the Rope”, “Blue Ruin” and with songs that range up 6 minutes in length it certainly not the worst example of the genre I’ve heard and considering its origins and that a small town mid Missouri label released it, I cant really complain.

However the band falls into the whole “needless bullshit” and messing around in the studio for a closing hidden track, but that doesn’t stop Estrus from being utterly worthless I might b tempted to check out the next release, whether its on September Riot Records or not.