With My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go, Aereogramme eschews the heavy in favor of the expansive. In contrast to their collaboration with Isis (In the Fishtank) the new material launches their mammoth size skyward – with explosive strings, ethereal keyboards, rolling fills, and crashing cymbals.
The result has its drawbacks. The wispy vocals and plaintive lyrics occasionally approach wimpy, the highland folk accents skirt adult contemporary, and the melodic similarities between the songs can be redundant. And I’d be an asshole to care about any of that. I should be lying back, letting the waves of powerfully emotive songcraft and tight, potent musicianship wash over me.
The strings on “Barriers” recall John Paul Jones’s work on R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, or even on Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” (without the minor-key sense of threat). Aereogramme still tries its hand at metal now and again, as in “Trenches,” but it really amounts to little more than a beat or two of tension in what is, essentially, a David Lean film translated into music.
My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go is the finest rainy-day driving music you’ll hear this year, and the best soundtrack to a movie no studio has the balls to make. Aereogramme reminds me that the most substantial thing you can weave from music is a passionate blast of wide, wide space.
– Lyam White
Aereogramme (Sonic Unyon)