It's necessary to be wary of the UK music press. If one were to take seriously each time the "next big thing" or "album of the year" is heralded, the number of tragically trendy and instantaneously outdated albums in one's record collection would increase exponentially. Take, for example, last year's Razorlight debut; though triumphantly hailed as the next Oasis (God forbid) by numerous rock critics, the album was ill-conceived, sloppy and largely pedantic.
The eponymous debut album by London's Engineers, however, has received a much quieter, yet equally positive reception by the UK media. Perhaps this could be attributed to the placid aesthetic of the album, or perhaps because Engineers have defied comparison to the two main components of contemporary British rock music (as delineated by the media, natch): bombastically rocking (á la Oasis, or more recently, the Kaiser Chiefs, Dogs Die in Hot Cars) and Coldplay.
The band namechecks Talk Talk and Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue in discussing influences, and the result of that fusion is unequivocally anti-Coldplay, despite the beauty of the album; Engineers is simply not pop-oriented and not intended for that type of listening. More valid comparisons would be with the shoegazing bands of yore, such as My Bloody Valentine and Ride, although it may be premature to hold Engineers quite to the standard of those bands, especially given some pronounced differences between them.
Engineers veers less toward atmospheric and more toward symphonic, although atmosphere certainly governs many song structures here. Each track stubbornly focuses, however, on the melodic line; despite the layers of sound, most songs are unapologetically memorable and unexpectedly catchy.
Exemplary of this is the opening track, "Home." It begins with lush vocal harmonies and crescendos to instrumentation so dense that it becomes nearly tangible, nearly visible. The synaesthesia is overt and appears on several tracks to come, becoming a unifying theme throughout the album. "Let's Just See" and "One in Seven" are dazzling in their exceptional design, while "Come in Out of the Rain" is blissfully melodic.
Glimmers of genius appear throughout the course of Engineers, but the album is not without its flaws. "Forgiveness" swirls and entrances like the rest of the album but is tarnished by an unfortunate somnambulant quality. The track doesn't work even though the superficial elements for a strong mid-album song seem to be in place.
Lyrics are additionally problematic. Those that are intelligible are at times overly simplistic; while straightforward lyrics suit the style of the music, Engineers at times crosses the thin line between charmingly simple and disarmingly vapid.
But as a whole, the album works -- in fact, the album works remarkably well. While the influence of the shoegazers is undeniable, Engineers takes the best of what the genre had to offer -- the lushness, the luxuriousness of the sound -- and modernizes it into a notably accessible and likely enduring end product. In this case, it would seem, the positive press was right on.
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