For a band, the name This Will Destroy You certainly invokes the expectation of heavy metal or hard rock, yet the sounds of this group’s third studio album, Another Language, couldn’t be anything further from that genre. The members ascribe their sound as “doomgaze,” a cross between doom metal and shoegaze. However, being that I associate all metal with hyper-violent percussive lines and throaty wallows/screaming whines, and likewise all shoegaze with drained murmurs barely half-sung, I don’t feel it’s quite either those things. Instead, instrumental and atmospheric, Another Language is more like a percussive soundtrack to that disquieting interstellar journey, punctured by interludes of extraordinary celestial dramatism.
Tracks like “Serpent Mound,” “Memory Loss” and “Mother Opiate” drift under ambient coatings of soft-minded pianos, simpering strings, and scraping textures before passing through supernovas of distorted guitar crush. There is a succession of aching beauty to these sounds, like during the piano-led intro to the final track, “God’s Teeth” which gives way to a far-off siren of spacey synth, which in turn heralds the melodic peace-cry of a lonesome solitary guitar. Yet moods vary; “Dustism,” ambles about in a happy haze for four minutes while “Invitation”, a darker rock march, burns with a sense of unrealized purpose. In “New Topia” pillowy pads and soporific bells form the fragile chrysalis from which a distant, ponderous rock beat tentatively emerges; then, like embryonic butterfly discovering itself suddenly in new sunlight, an exultant crush of distorted guitars and fervent haze takes explosive flight.
If, as the album titles suggests, these musicians are trying to communicate through a different medium, they are quite clearly trying to reach us more through our imagination than through the actual sound itself. Released from the bounded strains of vocals and archetypal rhythms, instrumental experimentation such as this paves the way for the mind to take the reigns—so listen and see where it takes you.
