While one shouldn’t ever truly judge a book – or a record in this instance – by its cover, however wonderfully designed it is, how’s this title for telegraphing the presence of a post-rock band: ‘each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness’. It’s not exactly ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’, is it?
*ctrlaltdelete *are a trio – one Ben, one Laura and a Simon for measure – but these four tracks sound every bit like the work of many more hands; really, this is music to which the adjective sky-scraping can effortlessly be applied without fear of stooping to cliché, or worse, of making mondegreens sound contrived in any way. While this type of detailed instrumental rock music, which occasionally gives way under the immense strain of a bombast so great cities would fall to such an assault if it were projected at their outer walls – we’ll stick with post-rock simply because it’s a convenience – has been done to death, rarely has its execution been so skilled, and so very well constructed. The gallows from which these songs hang so twitchingly are built from the sturdiest timber the nearby woods can provide; the rope is thicker than a wrist and the noose tighter than a Chinese Burn from the school bully. If your ears don’t pop like balloons under an articulated truck come the one-minute-thirty explosion of track three, ‘patter, chance and menace’, then you, sir, have senses of steel and all the emotional depth of a sheet of paper.
In short: this is brilliantly realised, however many stirring facets it lifts wholesale from predecessors’ past endeavours.
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7Mike Diver's Score