Wily guitars of early Bloc Party interwoven with the grim Northern wretchedness of The Chapman Family,
I Like Trains stitch a macabre patchwork to cloak the most tormented despondency. The mournful sorrow of Hope Is Not Enough could guide Fryars' tortured desolation to white lights and endless underpasses as chimerical guitars loll around debonair baritone vocals, We Saw The Deep is abyssal to the point of becoming chthonian as vacuously loose drum skins thud away about desolate bass plods, and forthcoming single A Father's Son is more woebegone than a thousand White Lies and Chapel Club records, as a visceral urgency drools from its gnarly jaws and melancholic drawls. These Feet Of Clay is reassuringly literate, an amalgamation of the dreary monotony of Hope Of The States and Depeche Mode had Dave Gahan been reared on the drab poignancy of James Lovelock, all transcribed over the most saddening of strings, whilst Sirens is metronomically hypnotic stuffed with an alluring repetition and intriguing morbidity. The sweeping, rolling centrepiece of He Who Saw The Deep, Sea Of Regrets, pertains to the funereal sombreness of a decomposing Arcade Fire and is utterly fantasy-decaying in the most celebratory of fashions, sprawling over eight of the most transiently majestic minutes committed to laser-etched acetate north of the M25 since Morrissey ceased to flounce about with a rider's worth of violet bouquets in grizzly working mens' clubs. Over its eleven gloom-stained tracks, He Who Saw The Deep can occasionally become all too sullen, too homogeneous, as Progress Is A Snake slithers through Mew-like bottom end guitars and When We Were Kings isn't as combustible an opener as its flickering instrumentation ought to have made it. Although it proves meritorious to stay onboard and to alight at A Divorce Before Marriage, as searing guitars meet major key convulsions in perhaps the LP's soaring moment of sublimity, of effervescent grandeur. Progressive, propulsive and regrettably most probably destined for the void, David Martin, Guy Bannister, Alistair Bowis and Simon Fogal ought to be melting enough hearts to fill Brixton Academy with the glacier glories contained within He Who Saw The Deep...
