Album Review: This Will Destroy You - Tunnel Blanket

If you have ever cared about any instrumental music ever, you will drop whatever you are or have been doing and pick this album up. A fairly new project from San Marcos, Texas, This Will Destroy You have vehemently rejected the term post-rock. Yet, despite what they're calling their music (and they call it "doomgaze", their interesting combination of doom metal and shoegazer), they've got to be doing something right. The new album, Tunnel Blanket, is a fantastic piece of work that should be a leading, quintessential album of any smart listener's library.



The first song on the record, "Little Smoke", begins very, very slowly, hearkening back to the band's roots of inspiration, namely Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Some while in, after progressively building up their sound, as post-rock bands do so well, a sudden torrent of discordant playing begins, really building up an overwhelming sorrow that continues for the longest time, getting ever louder, more chaotic, more drudging, until the tension strikes the most depressing chord in the history of music, and the sound just begins to fade into thin air, as a soft, melancholy resolution takes over. This resolution shapes and forms a few various themes in the succeeding song, "Glass Realms", which musically sounds much like a deep reflection of self, finding all of the worst possible memories and making the mood truly miserable.

As the album continues, the songs following the premiers take the shapes of their predecessors and continue to form and flip the style in and out of major and minor keys, and slow down to "Reprise". This song takes the most depressing parts of the first three songs, and reminisces over what has been accomplished in these songs in a sad, even ghostly demeanor, forcing the listener to really think and feel the emotional pain of the album. And with "Reprise" coming to an end, the album is halfway done. End spoiler here. But have faith, the rest of the album draws similar ties to the beginning, in a calm, dark way, reaching out for hope, and perhaps finally grasping it as "Hand Powered" draws to a close - and with it, the rest of the album.

This record has been one of the most powerful listens of my life. The entire listen was an awful, miserable, disgustingly bitter wreck, and I loved every depressing second of it. Tunnel Blanket is going down as one of my top three best albums of the year, and trust me, dear reader, it'll stay there for a long while. Those boys from Texas know what they're doing as well as anyone else out there in the post-rock community, and really created something special.

You can listen to some of the tracks here, and pick it up from several different sources here.

Track Listing:

1) Little Smoke
2) Glass Realms
3) Communal Blood
4) Reprise
5) Killed The Lord, Left For The New World
6) Osario
7) Black Dunes
8) Powered Hand