Motion Picture Soundtrack: 'The Shapes We Fear Are Of Our Own'

Taking their name from the closing song of Radiohead’s 'Kid A' album, Motion Picture Soundtrack more often recall 'The Bends' era, as performed by One Republic. That is to say they sound rather like a Radiohead shorn of their ungainly prickly bits - no bad thing, but nothing all that diverting either.

'The Shapes We Fear Are Of Our Own' is fairly typical, contemporary song-writing, but it is executed with such visceral aplomb and utterly expert production values that it could so easily be mistaken for an experienced group’s recording for a major label. Densely packed and yet spacious, inclusive and not exclusive; there is room for the listener in the intense wall of sound which is created. The unobtrusive musings on death and the afterlife lend songs like 'Mirrors' an added feel of finality and the string arrangements swallow the various soundscapes with a epicurean vigour.

'Departure' opens menacingly with deep, distorted power chords which are headily redolent of Soundgarden’s '4th Of July'. But instead of offering up a delightfully hellish cacophony, as in Soundgarden’s song, they instead err on the side of polite balmy tunefulness. Again it is a fair artistic move, but perhaps it is a misapprehension to assume the group decided on one direction or the other for their stylistic endeavours. After all this debut would suggest that polite balms are their fundamental stock in trade.

Like the general arrangements and playing (where the long shadows of those aforementioned artists, and others, are cast over the band), the singing touches base with many of the more sensitive singers in alternative rock. There are definite echoes of Keane’s Tom Chaplin in MPS’s more informal moments, and, in the more hysterical moments of histrionic emoting, shades of Jeff Buckley appear through the fog.

Enveloped in easy reverb and decorated with the lush intimacy of the singing, the record stretches out over chords of diffuse colours. Nonetheless, they are colours (a palette of mild blues, greens and melodramatic purples) which, though limited, are a pleasant sight. If there is room in the market for such minor conveyors of misery rock as Editors and One Republic, then surely a group as accomplished as this Kent quartet deserve recognition.



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Written by Richard Wood.