Album Notes

Taken from www.thesilentballet.com
"Unsurprisingly, Loyal Eyes Betrayed Our Minds is a shining example of what all instrumental rock bands should be doing. Gifts From Enola juxtapose elements of post-rock with a large hard-rock mindset and then allow an experimental bent to soften the edges. Structurally Loyal Eyes covers all the bases. Some songs explode out of the gates with blistering intensity and then recede slowly back into the sonic landscape with a timid disposition. Other times the band waits for the dynamic breakdown and sets the scene up with calm waves of ambience and scant field recordings. The longer tracks on the album "City Lights Scraped the Sky" and "Screaming at Anything that Move" see the band doing its best post-rock impression, undulating through passages densely populated with guitar riffs and those which contain only the solo beat of the drum or lone picking of the guitar. I find these two tracks to be the most indicative of the band's future; not only does the band break the mold and deliver the lengthy song in a digestible form, but we also see them delving into a slightly jam-oriented act. Had this been taken to its logical conclusion Loyal Eyes would liken have been ruined by the intangible meanderings of a reckless band. However, Gifts From Enola stay enough in form to keep the track moving along smoothly and this conscious move is a spectacular dessert to an already hearty meal.

I'd be lying if I said that Loyal Eyes didn't contain that spark that makes you want to listen to it repeatedly ad nausea. These four young men have a passion about the music they're creating that really makes the album an enjoyable experience. At the core of it, that’s really what music is all about. Youth often boils music down to the essentials, and Gifts From Enola shows exactly how captivating that can be. "