Given that Engineers hail from Wigan, it’d obviously be simple – facile, even – to compare them to The Verve. So let’s just get right on and do that, shall we? Like the earliest incarnation of The Verve (the one called plain old Verve), Engineers offer a psychedelic swirl of FX-laden guitar washes, exhortatory lyrics and blissful, trippy ambience. Verve, however, made a dreadful debut album, and happily Engineers differ in this respect.
Though they’re still best experienced in a live setting – where their strobe-lit wall of noise can induce severe discombobulation – Engineers here prove capable both of emotive songwriting and of virtuoso studio craft: it’s a struggle to resist the phrase “sonic cathedral”. It’s even harder to imagine a record more wildly out of step with the Franz Ferdinand/Kaiser Chiefs/Bloc Party triptych currently ruling the British indie scene, but there are other, older bands to which Engineers bear comparison.
Certain tracks on “Engineers” conjure the spectre of a mildly dumbed-down My Bloody Valentine with less annoying vocals. Others evoke The Beta Band’s neo-Gregorian mantras and general shamanic vibe. There are even a few that resemble pre-prog Air; while the ghost of Spacemen 3 regularly walks the halls.
Such well-chosen borrowings naturally make “Engineers” quite the sonic treat. Yet it falls shorts of true brilliance, for the simple reason that the band steadfastly refuse to rock-out. This self-restraint, they’ve explained in interviews, has been made a central plank of Engineers’ philosophy, presumably because they see rocking out as something only dumb bands do, despite the evidence to the contrary presented by Trail Of Dead, The Libertines, Spiritualized and countless others.
Whatever, too many of the tracks here are slow-burners that continuously threaten to explode into life without ever quite doing so: “Come in Out Of The Rain”, for example, is just one chord change away from greatness when it suddenly comes to a halt. The result is one long tantric tease of an album, all the more frustrating for its frequent flashes of inspiration.
When, during the climactic “One Of Seven”, Engineers finally succumb to the charms of slashing riffs and blazing feedback, you get to hear the awesome band they could and should be. One day, perhaps, they’ll abandon their snobbery and fulfil that potential. For now, though, they seem content to merely glide when they could soar, and that’s a real pity.
Still. At least they’re not The Verve.
