I know this review isn’t going to get too many views, as Christian post-rock isn’t exactly the favorite genre of most of the readership of this site. But for the few of you intrigued and the few fans of bands like Hands or other less-angsty Christian metal bands (Means, As Cities Burn, Oh Sleeper), A Hope For Home's Realis is a nice little effort.

My criticism of the band’s concept-based debut, The Everlasting Man, was that it was a solid shimmering, post-rock album, littered with some weak, clean emo vocals, and though I doubt the band took my criticism to heart, they seem to have fixed my issues, now focusing more on staggering ebb-and-flow post-rock, with more harsh vocals and less of the emo elements, and they've even cleaned up the clean vocals a bit.  

When I say "post rock," I mean the more delicate acts like At the Soundawn, Callisto, Day Without Dawn (and I guess that includes The Ocean now).  While A Hope For Home does have some crumbling steady, angular peaks and crescendos (i.e. “The Overman”, “Post Tenebrae Lux”), there’s nothing truly monolithic or earth-shaking, and the cleaner, atmospheric moments are more prevalent (“Nightfall”, “No Light”, “First Light of Dawn”).  You’d kind of expect that for a Christian act, and there are still some emo moments. There are some layered, urgent, shimmering Misery Signals moments, but more controlled and succinct, but they are there and enjoyable (“Withering Branches”, “The Machine Stops”, “The Crippling Fear”, "After"), and they serve to give the album more heft and metal credibility than The Everlasting Man had.
 
And then there’s a track like “Seasons” that mixes everything and hints at something pretty special. Label mates Hands are a better, heavier act right now, but I sense something far better lurking in A Hope For Home as they continue to develop their growing metal sensibility into their intellectual and graceful Christian prose.