This Will Destroy You – Another Language

Thrilling third LP from Texan instrumentalists...

Post-rock long ago lost much of its original meaning. One day it refers to one band; the next, another completely different sound. Generally, it suggests instrumental rock music – so in that sense, Texan foursome This Will Destroy You represent a typical post-rock outfit. But what’s special about them is they do this breed of music so much better than most.

‘Another Language’ is the band’s third album, and like its predecessors it mostly telegraphs its shifts with tried-and-tested cues and clues as to any one track’s destination. You might think this makes for a boring experience. You might also be an idiot.

It doesn’t matter how many times you sit down with, and get shattered by, the 3.12 break in ‘Serpent Mound’, or the cymbal annihilation of ‘War Prayer’, or the gear shift, from third to eighth, that comes midway through ‘Invitation’: these are moment that set the senses alight, that send the mind’s eye spinning through galactic vistas, even a dozen listens later.  

If this is post-rock, it’s in the purest sense of that prefix: it’s rock that goes beyond expectations for the genre, even while working within its confines, to somewhere that you sense its players aren’t quite accustomed to yet. So they’re stamping their identity the best way they know: by being as loud as possible.

Finding a new intensity that was only hinted at on their past long-players, This Will Destroy You haven’t thrown their striking intimacy out of the mix to make way for all the volume. And so ‘God’s Teeth’ closes this collection with elegance comparable to that heard on the Erased Tapes roster, with carefully controlled drone and chimes that break, finally, into static.

It’s a crackle and fizz best followed by an immediate return to the set’s opener, the lift-off explosion that is ‘New Topia’. And around you go again, inside the tumult, feeling the burn, chasing transcendence.

8/10

Words: Mike Diver

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