16

Engineers
Engineers

This is really lovely stuff. Dreamy guitar music that falls somewhere between the accessibility of Coldplay and the slightly more innovative sound of Sigur Ros, this has terms like ‘ethereal’ and ‘celestial’ written all over it. Engineers’ debut album is one that aims for soaring beauty, and on the whole delivers. OK, so as soon as they got even a slight amount of recognition they sold one of their tracks to Ocean Spray for them to advertise cranberry juice with, but that can be forgiven after their phenomenal Leeds Festival performance (one of the best of the whole weekend), which elevated them from solid also rans to serious contenders in my eyes. Singles ‘Forgiveness’ and ‘Home’ are similar to, but far better than, anything Coldplay have released this year. Yet they also get a bit more adventurous on other tracks, with ‘Come In Out Of The Rain’ calling to mind the likes of The Fire Theft, whilst some crazy and unexpected synth work on ‘Peter Street’ shoots them off into Boards Of Canada territory. This is harmonious and at times truly beautiful stuff, if slightly over produced for my taste. Engineers is either as innovative as pop gets or as mainstream as post-rock gets. Not sure which. Oh, as an aside, I originally bought this simply because I loved the album cover so much. I do that occasionally. This time it worked out pretty well.

Blessed with enough of the clean inoffensive mellow rock sound to appeal to a mass audience, but with enough edge and originality that people who would spit at Keane will still happily go along on this trip (as well as a handsome and charismatic frontman and a really outstanding live show) Engineers just need a little luck and they will become bigger than the biggest huge. In a year they could be stadium gods. Watch them grow…