Windsor for the Derby: Against Love

Label: Secretly Canadian

After years of being lumped into the "post-rock" ghetto (whatever and wherever that is), the roving band known as Windsor for the Derby reveals its true genre on Against Love: What this now Austin-based band plays is called "music," and on this album the Windsor sound takes many excellent forms. "Autumn Song" cooks itself up to a quasi-shoegaze blaze (kind of like a marriage of Seefeel and Yo La Tengo), while "Queen of the Sun" and the spectral "Alex Lucero" similarly slow-burn themselves into a shimmering, heady sound. On the opening title track, as well as "Moon Shadows" and the choral-abstraction "Tropical Depression," the band -- led by core-members Dan Matz and Jason McNeeley -- go into instrumental reverie, at times (again) evoking Yo La as its most haunting. On "After Love" and "Our Love's a Calamity" (both somewhat sunny-sounding, it should be noted), Matz and McNeeley take center stage as pop-songwriters, with plenty of picked, jangly guitars and sweet harmonizing. Now that the genre-wars of the '90s are over, Windsor for the Derby can be known for simply being good -- at whatever they do. (M.L. Thrope)