Bandcamp Toundra called their first three albums I, II and III. This one is called Siete, which is Spanish for seven. A band that numbers its records is making a claim about continuity, and forty minutes of instrumental music is a format where that claim either holds or becomes obvious.
It holds, with one deliberate exception sitting in the middle of the record.
The exception first
“30960” is four and a half minutes long, has a number for a title, and does the opposite of everything around it. It is the brightest thing here, the loudest in average level, the one with the least room between its peaks and its average, the thinnest in the low middle, and by a wide margin the least dynamic: it opens five decibels between its quiet and its loud passages where the record’s median is thirteen.
Put plainly, the six tracks around it breathe and this one does not. On most albums that would read as the track where the band ran out of ideas. Here it reads as a wall, dropped in at position five, between the two most dynamic pieces on the record. Whether you find that bracing or irritating is the thing that will decide how you feel about Siete.
What the rest does
Moves. “Costa Roja” opens twenty decibels between its softest and heaviest passages, “Sizigia” eighteen, “Rapier” over fourteen. For instrumental music that is the whole argument: with no voice to carry a line, the dynamic shape is the line, and a band that only knows loud has nothing to say past the second track.
The low end is where Toundra put their weight. Between twenty-two and twenty-seven percent of the energy sits under two hundred and fifty hertz across every piece here, which is heavier than the post-rock half of their tags suggests and is why the quiet passages read as restraint rather than as absence. Santi García mixed it and Víctor García mastered it at Ultramarinos Costa Brava, and the record has air in it throughout, nothing flattened, nothing shouted.
“Uniforme” closes with the heaviest bottom end of the seven and “Sizigia” has the darkest tonal centre, so the second half of the record gets lower as it goes. That is a choice, and it is the right one.
So
Recommended without much hedging. This is a band well past the point of having to prove anything, still building each piece around a shape rather than a riff, and the dynamic range on this one is wider than most instrumental records manage and wider than a lot of records with singers on them. The reservation is “30960”, which breaks the record’s logic on purpose and will cost them listeners who do not want a wall at the halfway mark. Start with “Costa Roja”, which is the clearest statement of what the band do when nothing is holding them back.
The spread is the story. Dynamic range runs from 5.3 decibels on “30960” to 20.0 on “Costa Roja”, with a median of 13.2 across the seven tracks, which is wide for any genre and unusually wide for instrumental music. “Sizigia” opens 18.1 and “Rapier” 14.4. “30960” is the outlier on every axis at once: the narrowest range, the highest tonal centre at 2503 hertz against 1955 to 2222 elsewhere, the lowest crest at 11.1, the loudest average level at minus 10.7, and the thinnest low midrange at 11.8 percent against 15.2 to 17.7 for the rest. Across the record the low band under two hundred and fifty hertz holds between 21.6 and 26.6 percent, with “Uniforme” carrying the most at 26.6 and “Sizigia” the darkest tonal centre at 1955. Peaks sit between 11.1 and 13.0 decibels above average, so nothing has been limited into a wall.
Standout tracks: Costa Roja, Sizigia, Rapier
