Post-rock may have settled into cozy familiarity, with chiming guitars building to crescendos defining a genre that’s centres around textures and dynamics, but This Will Destroy You exist to push the parameters of the style. Their instrumental epics aren’t so radical as to deter fans of the post-rock greats like Explosions in the Sky, but alongside acts such as Russian Circles and Pelican, the Texan quartet have, over the course of their career, striven to incorporate a range of styles within the post-rock template, and on previous outings have show that they aren’t afraid to bring the noise.
On ‘Another Language’, their fourth album, they paint from a broad sonic palette, but err toward the softer, more mellifluous and gentle with lengthy near-ambient passages and barely-there swathes of sound drifting in near invisibility dominating the album. Of course, they’re still big on dynamics, and punctuate these sweeping expanses, interrupted only by fractional glitches and stutters, with bursts of kaleidoscopic colour and multi-faceted walls of sound cascading like New Year’s fireworks.
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It all makes for an album that’s subtly dramatic and magnificently realised.
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