Default Champion

Default Champion’s new EP is a contemplative post-rock soundtrack for wide open spaces. The tightly arranged album opens with “Egg,” an introduction mingling introspective layers of guitar with sustained rips of distortion. “Caterpillar” is like the stoned teenage son of Joe Meek and Broken Social Scene, where layers of spaghetti-Western guitar pile onto an ambling, dusty percussion loop to become something greater than the sum of their parts. “Chrysalis,” the longest cut on the record, extends a hypnotic build into a climax of grinding and crashing before collapsing into a long, lonesome decaying note. Closing out the album, “Butterfly” lifts quickly out of the silence with a cheery/eerie loop of a child’s voice floating above reversed percussion. It serves as an optimistic finale to an album that manages to pack a long journey and a lot of range into four songs.