With little effort, Engineers could have chosen a name far more descriptive of their sound. Try Clouds, Grey Weather, the Feathers, the Lightweights, or the Anti-Gravity League (is that one taken yet?), for instance. Those all capture something in their sound, which is a soft, floating brand of ethereal shoegazer dreampop that hits with the force of a peck on the cheek. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. Their gentle approach is justified by the fact that their songs are quite memorable, written with a sense of grandeur and astral beauty.
There are no sharp edges on the band's debut, self-titled full-length, and any that might have cropped up (the guitars in "One in Seven", say) are sanded down by the wet, five-fathom production into rounded objects. Anyway, most of these songs would sound pretty good even without the oceans of reverb, something that's a fairly rare feat in texture-based rock. Complex vocal counterpoint hovers over organ and electric piano on "New Horizons" before the restrained drums kick in and gauzy guitars slide in to fill out the sound, and the effect is something akin to the quiet interlude of Yes' "Close to the Edge".
The programmed beats come out on "Let's Just See", and the band syncopates the whole song across the strange rhythm they've cooked up, backward guitars and ribbons of phaser swirling in the wings. Faraway strings add their glow to the super-soft-rock ballad "Forgiveness", a pillow of a song that overdoes the lulling roundness, leading to serotonin release and even sleep. The big harmonies that feel too gentle there feel great on "Come in and out of the Rain", though, a song with bolder dynamics and stratospheric chorus. The highlight is the opener: "Home" begins with a little organ and acoustic guitar supporting a group vocal but moves quickly into a big, dripping cavern where every surface glistens and guitars are keyboards are strings are guitars, all mixing into one shimmery texture.
On second thought, the term "shoegazer," which I used earlier, doesn't seem quite right, even though comparisons to bands like Slowdive and 7% Solution certainly hold up. These guys are definitely looking up and finding all the inspiration they need in the vastness above. The lack of gravity is an occasional knock against them, but by and large they make good use of their weightlessness, and Engineers is a solid debut.
