Staff Reviews

This Will Destroy You - Tunnel Blanket

Review by Alex Yau

You can’t help feel that TWDY are sitting a little too comfortably. »

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recorded with john congleton (black mountain, bill callahan, modest mouse), tunnel blanket delivers the epic-in-scope soundscapes that followers of its makers' previous recordings are accustomed to, but presents them in new lights - where once the sun shone down bright upon immediate tropes and traits, now their work is better suited to distant starlight, casting changeable shadows across vistas of inspired, ambitious amplification. this is not an album to pick through in search of bold hooks and instant melodies. it is an ever-shifting, always moving work, which seems to evolve before the listener - spidery guitar lines feeling their way forth like vines scrambling up trunks in time-lapse photography. tunnel blanket's eight tracks can be heard as movements in a single work - each constituent as important to the overall ebb and flow of proceedings as any other. within each a certain beauty is manifested, one born of a desire to step free from common pigeonholes and into a realm where parallels are, at best, fleeting: a glimpse of fennesz here, of stars of the lid in the record's more serene passages. brian eno's 'apollo' album may come to mind on a couple of occasions. what tunnel blanket categorically is not, however, is a release that shares its genes with anything that could be deemed typically post-rock in structure. the builds here keep building; the breaks are permanent. listen and it's like the guitars are singing out a paean to the endless space above, celebrating the primal splendour of the unexplored dark. listen, closer, and everything becomes clear.
description from www.roughtrade.com