All Structures Align: Cut the Engines

Currently, I can’t think of another band across the U.K. that is in better creative form than All Structures Align. In many ways, they have been the breath of fresh air that the underground music post-lockdown world has needed.

That’s not to say All Structures Align make music to lift you out of a black hole. There’s a raw honesty in what brothers Tim and Adam Ineson do. Not fudging it in the slightest, their authenticity well and truly shines through. Take their two wonderful 2022 releases, Details and Drawings and Distance and Departure. Both albums that are ambiguous concoctions drawing from the ’90s underground and delivered with vital new parts and perspectives.

While listening to All Structures Align may have you reaching for your Polvo and June of 44 records, through an uncanny perceptiveness, they sound like neither of them. It’s through exploring the inner grains of sound from this period that they arrive at a place where post-rock is actually exciting again. On Cut the Engines, the much-anticipated follow-up to Distance and Departure, in many ways it’s eight songs that take thematically remnants of Slint’s Washer and build on this core idea in superb variety of ways.

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While Details and Drawings and Distance and Departure were largely orchestrated by the Inesons, they have added worthy weapons to their arsenal, with underground veterans, bassist Oli Heffernan (Ivan the Tolerable, Houseplants, King Champion Sounds et al), drummer Neil Turpin (Bilge Pump, Objections) and guitarist Andrew Pollard (Polaris) now featuring in what is now the band’s core line-up.

It’s the space that makes All Structures Align what they are. Sinewy juxtapositions and mistaken blind alleys, and through these masqueraded passages, the band blend visceral tones with gentle ruminations, resulting in a journey where you never quite know where you’re going to end up. “Could be wild / Could be homespun,” sings Tim on Cut the Engines’ highlight, Built to Regret.

Meanwhile on opening gambit, Half in Water, All Structures Align begin with those bourgeoning build-ups around a core riff. And from here the space to manoeuvre radiates with beautiful atmospheres and wonderful instrumental interplay.

Six Falcon is next, and in true A.S.A. fashion, they dispense the kind of eerie grind that takes post-rock to interesting new places. The vagueness continues during the abstract meanderings of Hopes Are Quartered and later with Holds A Fall. Both filled with diesel-powered sounds that swerve and spin like negotiating a series of hairpin turns.

Then there’s Wait Here’s Something. Here the band reveals themselves perhaps like never before with a song steeped in sadcore homage, taking the ideas of Bedhead and presenting them in multi-faceted ways; the song culminating with the kind of brawn not heard on their previous two releases.

Which leads into Cut the Engine’s highlight, Built to Regret (“We’ll carve out a home, and block out the rest”). A song that draws from the band’s body of work, Built to Regret swirls with the kind of wholesome sonics only afforded with more people making the beautiful noise, and with new band in tow, the Ineson brothers produce their best song yet.

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While Built to Regret may well be the highlight, thematically and sonically, Everything Loose Tied Down perhaps represents this band best. Here All Structures Align play between the lines of dread and hope, and it creates the nervous tension which drew us to the band in the first place. Not only that, while most bands aim for that release, All Structures Align revel in the uncertainty. (“With the storm cloud much deep / And the dream that is borderline”).

Always ones to end emphatically, it’s no different here with Bells and Knives. A gorgeous curtain call, as the band moves to Turnpin’s tempos from behind the drum-kit. It’s music created in the half-space, and time and time again All Structures Align manage to find a way.

Not just with Cut the Engines, but over their three-album reign, All Structures Align have proven that they are the embodiment of what guitar-based music should sound like. It’s open architecture from a band who knows that the not all the intricacies in this in this life can be untangled: sometimes it’s best to just leave them. There’s an honesty to that, and on Cut the Engines, that message shines through clearer than it ever has.

Cut the Engines is out Friday via Wrong Speed Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.