U.S. Maple does not feel like a band. U.S. Maple feels like a singular entity. U.S. Maple, a contradiction in and of itself, and a contradiction in sound, chaotic and disorganized in order to form a sort of unstructured structure, creating beauty and unpredictability out of fucked-up randomness. It sounds weird. It twists around an idea without warning and transforms into another then snaps back to the first. It rambles, seemingly aimlessly at first glance, but by the end, everything has taken its natural course, and nothing was truly out of place.

U.S. Maple doesn't sound like anything else, except U.S. Maple. The singer part of U.S. Maple moans its alien lyrics, using virtually no dynamic, slurring its words together to create new ones, gasping for breath. The guitar and bass part creates spontaneous riffs, at once sounding classic like something you know you've heard and sounding as if they're fucking it up, playing upside down with their eyes closed and their fingers bent backwards. The rhythm part is always on the edge.

U.S. Maple has released three albums before Acre Thrills, and this fourth effort represents a venture into actual melody, at least more so than they've attempted before. Traditional chord progressions are sometimes utilized, and occasionally, every instrument combines to create a full melody, but then the guitar neck starts to bend again or the bassist hits a wrong note or the cymbals fall off and it's all according to plan. The drums create much more of a rhythmic base than usual, but still sound as if the set's at the breaking point and could collapse at any minute. It creates an unpredictability missing in post-rock these days.

Which brings me to another point, a genre. What is U.S. Maple, post-rock? Yes, perhaps in the strictest, most unique sense, as guitars that might have been used to create powerful, cohesive riffs are now used to turn those inside out, and drums that might have been used to pound out booming fills are now sped up and slowed down to highlight all the wrong moments, and there's no distortion, and the clean sound of the guitars becomes dirtied only by the inky fingers of the players. But it all comes together in something that works, and it's constantly new even after your twentieth listen. It's a malfunctioning machine that suddenly becomes aware of its existence. Something mechanical that breathes, creating random organic sequences of sound out of organic instruments based on a pre-planned, pre-programmed system meant to bend every notion of traditional guitar music out of shape.

"Total Fruit Warning" ends with a cat's purr, but recorded in such a way that it sounds like an unworldly beast's filtered breathing, either dying or revitalizing itself, and that singular breathtaking moment represents the music of this entity as a whole. All this contradiction, all this paradox, it all feels natural. And in the end, U.S. Maple have finally reached brilliance with Acre Thrills, a gorgeously dangerous combination of everything they've seemed to strive for that now makes them imperfectly perfect.

-Spencer Owen