Vessels

by Simon T Diplock

Leeds collective aim to move you

"More than just a band for critics and scene specialists to salivate over, Vessels have the ability to enchant almost anyone. Sure, there’s no threat of a chorus following a verse anywhere in their output but even their ten minutes epics are fascinating for every second."

Some of the following is going to seem familiar. There’s just no way around it. It’s because people have spent hours and days devoted to this kind of music already, because some of the sounds here have been discussed many times over, and because lots of these words will have been used before. Words like ambitious and epic and cinematic and celestial and stunning. But while the words might have been used before, the band inspiring them this time, Leeds collective Vessels, are anything but ordinary.

Ok so the base for the band’s music isn’t really up for debate. Vessels are a post-rock outfit, and they come with all the slow builds, big crescendos, quiet/loud shifts and extended compositions that that suggests. But beyond that the band are never once content to ape their influences or peers or stick with convention. Instead doses of digital hardcore, ghostly whispers, and novel skittery echoes pepper proceedings, their songs twist and turn into new surroundings, and they have absolutely no fear of genre boundaries either, leaping from post-rock bliss past dance beats and hard, metallic riffing and back again, sometimes in the same song. Oh and those songs, those songs are something else.

‘Altered Beast’, the opening cut from band’s forthcoming debut full-length ‘White Fields And Open Devices’, swells from sunrise-soundtracking twinkles to tapped guitars, piano pieces, and surges of sheer volume that fit together like a wonderful jigsaw. ‘An Idle Brain…’ is half fidgety, brain-frying math-rock, half static-laced lullaby, and ‘A Hundred Times in Every Direction’, despite being the album’s lead single, ebbs with vocal energy and haunting melodies and flows like white water with wanton, electric power. And it’s this willingness, this need even, to explore and experiment and never sit still that makes everything the band does such consistently captivating, fascinating listening. And yet it all seems so effortless.

More than just a band for critics and scene specialists to salivate over see, Vessels have the ability to enchant almost anyone. Sure, there’s no threat of a chorus following a verse anywhere in their output but pop sensibilities shone through in the dreamy swell of first 7” release ‘Yuki’, and although album closer ‘Wave Those Arms, Airmen’ stretches out for ten minutes, built almost entirely from feedback and found noise, it’s absolutely fascinating for every second. And it’s then that you realise that while Vessels inspire some of the usual post-rock descriptors, they also demand all sorts of words that simply aren’t associated with music like this too. For this is a charming, coolly refreshing band, and an utterly, easily accessible one as well.

Of course none of this will be a surprise to anyone who has caught the band live since their 2005 inception- anyone who has seen the band set up simply but play so tightly and technically or use two drummers, ear-stinging volume and complex quiets and yet hold the attention of an impartial pub crowd- but it’s still a joy to hear them translate that class into solid form. And gather praise from almost every corner of the music world while doing it. They're going to have people pulling out their hair trying to find the right way to describe them, but Vessels are quite simply one of the best new bands of recent years.

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