By: Dylan Schink
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This Will Destroy You have long rejected the label “post-rock” (though their appearance at ArcTanGent this year suggests their views on this may have softened), but their influence on other bands that do identify as such has led to them being canonised as pillars of the genre. Since starting in 2004, This Will Destroy You, along with The Red Sparowes and a handful of other bands, began shaping the genre to its late 2000s form. Whether or not they like it, This Will Destroy You have helped define what post-rock means today, and are as inseparable from it as Robert Johnson was from the blues.
As a listening experience, Another Language very much washes over you. Though the songs don’t blend into a non-stop whole like a prog-rock album, it’s easy not to notice where one ends and another begins. The real changes in the album are marked by dynamics. The standard formula of soft-loud-soft is strongly at play in this album, but it also marks out a pattern of cycling between disinterest and incredible engagement. This Will Destroy You have never been incredible at writing interesting ambient moments, but Another Language falls especially flat in this regard, with entire songs like ‘The Puritan’ coming across as a poor, uninspired forgery of Stars of The Lid, made worse by the fact that it then leads into the equally uninteresting ‘Mother Opiate’. Unreasonably long stretches of the album’s forty seven minute runtime just become white noise, and only during the “big songs” like ‘Invitation’ and ‘New Topia’ am I reminded that I’m listening to an album that I’m not meant to be falling asleep to.
That said, when the band actually starts playing, it’s as impressive as ever. It’s heavy, driving, layered and thrilling, like post-rock should be. ‘Memory Loss’ particularly sticks with me. It’s a towering colossus of noise that can consume you if you’re in the right frame of mind, it shows that This Will Destroy You know how to make an incredible track, I just wish they would do it more often. ‘God’s Teeth’ closes out the album, and it’s more ambient music, but it’s the first time I think I’ve ever heard them do it really well. It would be an amazing closer to an album where more happened.
At the end of the day, Another Language is Another This Will Destroy You album. There’s a fair amount on it that fans of the band will enjoy, but if you’ve never been that taken with This Will Destroy You, Another Language won’t change your mind, and if you’ve never heard This Will Destroy You, it’s not the place to start.
