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Let’s face the facts: fact #1: It’s taken Apricot Rail four years to put out their second album. Fact #2:Quarrels is a gorgeous album.

Apricot Rail is a multi-instrumental pop sextet based in Perth, and they take us with them on a pleasant journey visiting 12 songs of comforting vibes and soothing relaxation. It’s hard to explain or describe the beauty of Quarrels. You’d better take the listening trip yourself. The opening “Basket Press”, which is a single choice, sets the standard, along with single # 2 off this album “Surry Hills”, which I described at the time as ‘…a blooming, flowering track, almost like a glass of rich, red wine.. (Australian, of course).’ Sometimes you’ll find Twin Peakish moods, other times slightly (slightly) like Chicagoans such as Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs (when the latter two do melodic pop, not their impro-experimentalism). Imagine Explosions In The Sky without explosives, or Mogwai without noisy cascades. Even Bedhead springs to mind, even if its only within a song, or maybe part of a fragment. My point is; even though the bands and artists listed are somewhat different in style from Apricot Rail, they’re sort of related at a higher level; philosophically and mentally.

Like I said, you’d better check out Quarrels yourself. And, well, as a title ‘Quarrels’ might be somewhat misleading. There are no traces of anger or heated disputes present at all. With an album like this it’s hard, almost impossible to pick favourite tracks. Simply because they all are. That’s a fact. Fact #3.”
- Luna Kafe

“At the start of post-rock, Simon Reynolds coined the term to highlight the technical innovativeness of a particular set of bands and it worked. Music history doesn’t highlight this, but Slint’s Spiderland and Nirvana’s Nevermind were both released in 1991. One would become the mainstream archetype for rock music for the next five years, the other a touchstone for the underground response to alt-rock’s popularity. It sounds arcane and ridiculous, but there was a real sense of moving past rock there for a few years; with Nirvana and Melvins and Sonic Youth and Mudhoney and Helmet all on major labels, all in the popular mainstream, what more could there be left to build? For a brief moment, rock seemed like finished business. And then the whole thing collapsed and rock has pretty much been out of vogue ever since, which is where it belongs.

The curious postscript to all this is that ‘post-rock’ stuck around and became a genre of sorts: mostly or entirely instrumental music, played by a rock ensemble, lots of effects, often with some sort of classical instrumentation: a violin, a cello or, in Apricot Rail’s case, a flute and clarinet. It may not be popular or critically admired or cool, but it has its audience and a network. There are post-rock bands in every Australian city and, like folk music, they all sound a little alike. I find it fascinating because folk art usually exists to maintain a verbal/lyrical conversation, but what do these bands have to say to each other and the people who like them?

All this is a bit much to dump on Apricot Rail’s shoulders. The Perth six-piece lay out an extremely concise and textured second album with Quarrels, and for the most part it manages to evade many of my least favourite parts of post-rock. There are plenty of chiming harmonics and clean, delayed guitars, gently shifting arpeggios and a glockenspiel lead, but the band also sneak in a few surprises: the droned outro of ‘Cicadas Part Two’; the super intricate structure, almost sampled feel of ‘Third Balloon’; the weird electronics of ‘Eked’; and a dedication to shorter songs. The album was mixed by Scott Solter (Superchunk, The Mountain Goats) with a view to maximum headphone euphoria and the stereo spectrum is given a thorough workout, the band cutting in and out, left to right and back and forth. It comes off as beautiful and exacting, if a little cold. So exactly right then.

Apricot Rail – ‘Basket Press’ by Hidden Shoal Recordings

Dialling into Quarrels makes a lot of sense, especially if I look out the window at sunny suburbia. Apricot Rail share none of Mogwai’s metal or Euro-club/pub tendencies, nor much of Explosions in the Sky’s American bombast, and very few post-rock bands in recent years have tried on the literary expanses of Spiderland. Instead, this band inhabits a world similar to how I see Perth in my mind’s eye: a very pretty and bright city by the ocean, the sort of place anyone would desperately want to live if they hadn’t grown up there (and if mining money hadn’t made dinner for two an upper-middle-class expense).

It’s a tight fit between sound and place. I think bands like Apricot Rail are about approximating the pastoral splendour and the clean suburban streets of Australia, something that might be problematic if it weren’t so niche, and in any case it’s something many of us live within every day. In a rock culture obsessed with painting Australia as a swamp or southern-gothic wasteland or a retched sprawl of rundown sharehouses, how can a small measure of prettiness be such a crime?”

- Mess + Noise

“I’m not exactly sure why but for whatever reason I mistakenly had Apricot Rail pegged as a hard-hitting guitar-driven outfit. That impression was quickly set right when I put on the Perth-based sextet’s sophomore outing Quarrels and was presented with the opening song “Basket Press,” a luscious instrumental that does feature guitars but does so primarily for the purposes of crafting a soothing mood. Yes, a heavier guitar-fueled attack does eventually surface, but not before Mayuka Juber’s flute appears to establish even more clearly the band’s multi-coloured identity. Apricot Rail helps distinguish its sound from the competition by prominently featuring woodwinds in its arrangements (bassist Daniel Burt also plays saxophone and Juber contributes clarinet as well as flute to the recording). As much pop group as post-rock outfit, the group also includes drummer Matt Saville and guitarists Ambrose Nock, Justin Manzano, and Jack Quirk, all of whom enrich the songs with bold splashes of colour (vocals, melodica, trumpet, electronics, and glockenspiel).

Largely recorded over a four-day spell during January 2012 in an isolated farmhouse in Western Australia, Quarrels offers a bounty of splendid songcraft and arrangements. The second piece, “Another Roof, Another Proof,” captures the band’s softer side and lightness of touch in beautiful manner, and again demonstrates the rich range of instrumental colour the sextet is capable of bringing to an arrangement. “Cicadas…Part Two” likewise spotlights the band’s softer side when a lovely waltz episode appears at the song’s center.

Folk melodies etched by electric guitar and voice (“Come to Glasgow, my darling / And we’re never coming home again”) lend “Running with an Egg on a Spoon” an appealingly rustic and nostalgic feel, and while I’ve not been to “Surry Hills,” based on the luscious setting evoked by the band, it’s definitely a place I’d welcome visiting, especially when wide open skies and soul-replenishing natural air are conjured so vividly by it. A brief foray into guitar raucousness notwithstanding (“The Sunlight Experiments”), Quarrels impresses as a twelve-song collection that makes a more-than-strong case for Apricot Rail’s particular blend of instrumental pop and post-rock.”

- Apricot Rail

“…I would almost hesitate to call this new release post-rock.  Post-rock music in its purest form is highly processed and heavily distorted instrumental rock music that more often than not hints at a coming apocalypse.  Apricot Rail has crafted an interesting release in instrumental music that eschews the heavy distortion for more organic instrumental melodies with just enough feedback to provide a sweeping atmospheric texture.

Vocals, while sparse, only serve to accentuate certain melodies without playing an integral part in the sound as a whole.  This is immediately evident from the opening bars of the very first track.  Another thing that stands out with this release is that this band is not afraid to experiment with lullaby-style electronic harmonies or unconventional instrumentation.  More than one track includes strings and several feature full-on horn sections.  This creates yet another interesting dynamic in the music.  During Cicadas…Part II, a horn section almost had me convinced that I was listening to an odd rendering of The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields.  This was a rather astute observation considering that I’m not a Beatles fan.

This album almost literally renders me speechless.  It is that good.  There is something in this music for everyone.  I can’t find a single beef with the flow of this album.  “Quarrels” is certainly an early candidate to make our year-end list.  This is extremely impressive music from a relatively unknown band.  The music beautiful and uplifting in ways that most post-rock fails or does not care to attempt.  If you like instrumental music of any kind, you MUST check this out…”

- Think Muzik