Harbors

Collections Of Colonies Of Bees could very well prove to be the Green River of Wisconsin post-rock indie, in that its members go on to play in different—and possibly better—bands. After a handful of albums, CoCoBees convened with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver for the endlessly hyped Volcano Choir, a band that has an inarguably higher profile than Collections. Meanwhile, drummer Jon Mueller has recently gotten his solo project up and running, and now Collections has spawned its greatest (so far) side project: Guitarist Thomas Wincek’s All Tiny Creatures, and the band’s debut full-length for Hometapes, Harbors.

Harbors will be friendly territory for those familiar with Wincek’s work in Collections and Volcano Choir, as he hasn’t bailed on the billowy post-soft-rock that provided the anchor for those bands’ experimentation. But All Tiny Creatures splits the difference between the instrumental progressivism of Colonies and the electronic meanderings of Volcano Choir. It’s all about texture and mood over narrative cohesion with All Tiny Creatures, who blend electronic ambient passages with fluttering interlocking guitar riffs and a wide scope grandeur.

The track that has swallowed most of the pre-release hype for Harbors is “An Iris,” the collaboration with Vernon. Like his work in Volcano Choir, Vernon blends in to the wills of his collaborators, singing barely intelligible lyrics that are, again, all mood over cohesion. But the album has more twists and turns than a Vernon feature: The always building “Holography” is as close to inspirational post-rock as you can get, “Aviation Class” flirts with art-disco, “Cargo Maps” suggests The Sea And Cake soundtracking a Wes Anderson movie, while the fractured light of album highlight “Glass Bubbles” wisps like driven snow.

Like all great post-rock works, the main thing that sticks out about Harbors is how complete and considered it sounds. From the sequencing to the production, Harbors sounds exactly like the long labor of love it was for Wincek, who quit Collections Of Colonies Of Bees to focus on it. All Tiny Creatures will probably be second fiddle to Volcano Choir for the foreseeable future, but the group shows that Collections Of Colonies Of Bees have a deeper bench than anyone probably realized.