Album review: Engineers – Three Fact Fader

If you’ve been having a week like I’ve been having (computer problems leading to dropped deadlines and assorted timesuck – don’t ask, seriously) you’ll be in need of something to chill you out a bit. Well, talk about timing, because Three Fact Fader by Engineers is exactly what the doctor ordered.

On the subject of timing, though, Three Fact Fader follows four years after their eponymous début, thanks to the quicksand mire of record label restructuring wranglings. But far from sounding late to the party, Engineers come out smelling like the bright shiny edge of the Zeitgeist, as every reviewer in the world tries gleefully to put them in the shoegaze revival pigeonhole.

It’s an understandable stab at taxonomy, to be fair. Comparisons to the recently reformed and ever-influential My Bloody Valentine are easy to make, thanks to Simon Phipps’ buried and dreamy vocals following the same sort of winsome melodies that Bilinda Butcher was prone to use, and there’s a definite wall-of-sound approach being taken to the production. But where you drown in the output of Kevin Shields and company, you float on the surface of Engineers, a Dead Sea of blissful tone saturation that buoys you up and bathes away the aches and pains of the day.

Seriously, you’ll struggle to do anything much once you start listening to Three Fact Fader, to the extent that if someone charged me with doing a remake of Soylent Green I’d draft them in to score the music for the euthanasia scene – if I had my choice of audio while slowly slipping into the last dreamless sleep, I can’t think of anything more soothing or tonally appropriate. That said, the music of Engineers would fit just as well with slow-motion footage of blissed-out pill-heads lolling around in zero-gravity and wearing shiny silver Future Suits Of The Future. Or with the sun-dappled countryside sliding by beyond a train window. Or with the patterns on the inside of your own eyelids.

See? Four paragraphs in, and all I’ve done is waffle on about how beautiful it all is, like your most naïve friend seeing the Glastonbury stone circle for the first time. I keep trying to write about the endless veneered layers of bass, guitar and synthesizer tones that swirl together like translucent rivers of sound throughout Three Fact Fader; about the delicate but colossal melodies that swim within those layers, slipping sinuously between the almost-submerged drums; about Phipps’ narcoleptic cough-medicine-sweet croons… but every time I try, I drift off into the sound itself, only to find myself sat still with my eyes shut, having not touched the keyboard for about fifteen minutes.

Yeah, yeah, what a mercy, right? But look, let’s put it this way: I hear a lot of new music in the course of running this website, and on previous form I’d say it’s fair to estimate that maybe 70% does nothing for me at all, 20% is a pleasurable listen, and the last 10% are the albums I recommend to all my friends. Within that last 10% lie the handful of records – maybe four or five a year, rarely more – that blow me away so much that I know I’m going to go out of my way to follow their creators to hell and back. And it’s in that special handful that Three Fact Fader finds itself. It’s stunning, sumptuous, and the perfect antidote to the pompous indie-pop and tough-guy metallisms of the moment. Engineers are your new favourite band; go find out why.