Ef - Give Me Beauty Or Give Me Death

Artist: Ef
Album:Give Me Beauty Or Give Me Death
Year: 2006
Genre:Post - Rock
Country:Sweden













Ef is a post-rock band from Gothenburg, Sweden. Using little vocals, they feature a wide variety of instruments.
Ef is probably the best post-rock band you’ve never heard. All right, now you’ve just got to read the rest of the review, right? What a killer opening! I could go into a cute little anecdote about how you actually drafted Chris Shelton in your fantasy baseball league and how he destroyed everything in sight and how he is the best sleeper pick of all-time and…whatever. With that being said, this album will end up being one of the best this year, and will fly way under the radar as well. Give Me Beauty…Or Give Me Death! is pretty much everything awesome about the genre, rolled up into a concise and nearly perfect 55-minute record. The best way to describe a post-rock band is to compare them to other post-rock bands, and Ef have control over the beauty of Explosions in the Sky, the movement of This Will Destroy You (whose EP Young Mountain holds the title of “Best album of 2005 that I didn’t hear until 2006”), and the climaxes of Mogwai. And, unlike many post-rock bands, they use vocals, albeit sparingly; however, it is pulled off especially well, never overused, timed perfectly to keep songs moving along as opposed to droning most uninterestingly as some post-rock bands seem to do. In fact, these seven Swedes have created the most well-paced and exciting post-rock record since The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. If post-rock turns you off due to an all-too-typical structure (soft, boring five-minute intro into a two-minute loud part for eight songs and over an hour -- yeah, I know some of you see it that way), then Give Me Beauty…Or Give Me Death! will be a blast of fresh air for you. Each of the six tracks has its own identity, and the track length is varied as well, which mixes things up a bit and offers up some of the tracks as segues between the more epic, lengthier pieces (not throwaways, mind you!). Ef incorporates some organ in their music, some strings, and some melodica (sort of like a harmonica, but not) which keeps things interesting, but not enough so that the music becomes too much; it’s still a very subtle, beautiful disc.(punknews.org)
Ef released the sleeper hit of 2006. If you love post-rock, or music in general, you should give this a whirl. It’s not just background music; there’s more than enough here to launch Give Me Beauty…Or Give Me Death! right into the foreground.