Ioda Rosa - Ferris Wheel

Ioda Rosa

Ferris Wheel
​self-released; 2016

3.8 out of 5

By Ted rogen

Ioda rosa is a five-piece band from Australia that recently released Ferris Wheel. It’s a diverse album  which makes it hard to pin down their sound but a lot of their music has a tinge of post-rock. 

You can hear this on the very first song “Ferris Wheel.” This song in particular seems to be directly influenced by the band Mogwai. There are a number of similarities especially to the album Rock Action. The vocals are delivered deadpan in the beginning but get more dynamic as the song progresses. The song is almost ten minutes and has a number of peaks and valleys through its time span. 

“Gradient” is a distorted swirl of sounds.There were some pretty inventive sounds especially towards the end. I really enjoyed the vocal melodies here and the vocalist’s delivery on this song. He sings, “Look at all the details / The flora and fauna / We’re flying through / The negative space.”

“The Choreographer”  almost sounds like a different band. It just has a really different feel. The strummed acoustic guitar, piano and horns sounded good together. On top of that the vocals are dynamic and feel full of emotion. “Holy Drone” is another successful effort. The song is atmospheric with horns and clean guitars and eventually builds to a crescendo of elevated vocal melodies and slow moving but effective rocking out. 

“Figure Eights” bubbles with surrounding sounds that almost envelope the lead vocals. Perhaps a little too much. They close with “Takotsubo” which is arguably the highlight. In its ten minutes the song goes a lot of places but is really a success because of the powerful vocal performances. 

​Ferris Wheel is an album where every song feels like its own entity with a distinct palette of tones and texture never to return. It may not make for the most cohesive album in the world but makes up for that in different ways. Overall Ferris Wheel is enjoyable album that actually grew on me the more time I spent with it.

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