Let's see. Literate but cumbersome album title? Check. Serpentine and repetitive instrumentals? Check. Clinical substitution of Roman numerals for song titles? Check. Cred to burn, gleaned largely from band members' obscure but locally heroic previous outfits? Check. The symptoms leave little room for interpretation. All signs point to post-rock.

You've probably heard this one: three guys encounter a steaming pile of shit in the middle of the sidewalk and stop dead in their tracks. One says, "Hmm. Do you think that's shit?" First guy bends over a takes a whiff: "Smells like shit," he says. Second guy pokes at it a few times before mashing his palm in the pile: "Sure feels like shit," he decides. Third guy takes a pinch of it to his tongue: "Man, this tastes like shit! Guys, I think this is definitely shit!" First one says, "Whoa, it's a good thing we didn't step in it."

Upon first encountering it, Lumen's The Man Felt an Iron Hand smells, feels and tastes just like a steaming pile of post-rock. But I stepped in it anyway.

Fionic as it sounds, Lumen's lengthy (and elegantly violent) album title is actually cribbed straight from a short story by one of the twentieth century's most inventive fabulists, the late Italo Calvino-- "The Mine Fields," from Difficult Loves. Superfluous, perhaps, but at least it isn't some cocktail napkin dreck. And Lumen does indeed feature members of two noted San Francisco post-rock combos, A Minor Forest and Tarantel. And they have indeed foregone track titles for their complex and warmly engaging debut. But looks and smells can be deceiving. Something about The Man Felt an Iron Hand evades the harmless academics that have come to serve as the signature of the post-rock non-genre. Something like prog.

The Man Felt an Iron Hand is largely acoustic, dominated by guitars and accordions; keyboards color the spaces between, while the drumming is absolutely berserk. The guitars on "I" owe more to the ecstatic meandering of John Fahey than the dour meditations of Aerial M-- reckless, exotic and free. The fat organs pulse and splash with an almost psych-bluesy swagger. Beneath them, the percussion seems possessed: rocking frenetically between John Bonham and Rasheed Ali. The music sounds like a skeletal prog-rock: wooden and spare, but no less grand.

"II" manages to conjure the loping medievalism that has become the butt of all Canterbury prog jokes. But for all the churchy organs and lute-like guitars, there isn't an ounce of wank to be had. Perhaps it's the fierce drums that manage to keep the edge on Lumen razor sharp; on paper it reads like a lull, but somehow the music always manages to shred a bit like the man in the title. Yet "VII" succeeds without any percussion at all; it pits the minimal guitars against each other to drone and drift like layers of a Reich piece, alternately dissonant and complimentary. Somehow, Lumen makes experimentation sound sweet and almost comforting.

So pick it up and eat it. The Man Felt an Iron Hand isn't what you think it is. Yes, it's dressed like post-rock, but its soul is prog and its balls are metal. For a moment you're surprised that it's not content to serve as sonic wallpaper. Where do these guys get off? There's an ambition and aggression to Lumen that so much contemporary instrumental rock has lost. Besides, Jim O'Rourke's nowhere to be found on it. And you're tracking it all over the carpet.

-Brent S. Sirota, October 5th, 2001