ALBUM REVIEW: No Feeling Is Final – Maybeshewill
Collective shock was felt around the post-rock world when MAYBESHEWILL, long considered titans of the genre, announced their hiatus. Thankfully, it wasn’t the end of the band; they continued working on material separately in the intervening years and eventually felt they had not only more to say, but that MAYBESHEWILL was the vehicle with which to say it. That brings us to No Feeling Is Final, their fifth collective effort, borne of the need to decry the rapid decline of our climate and the billionaires causing it. It’s once more an instrumental record, bar the odd sample, rooted in their penchant for cinematic soundscapes and stirring emotion. Crucially, it shows the band at their most expansive and daringly hopeful that there is something to be done, if people can work collectively on the solutions to the crises facing the planet.
Opener We’ve Arrived At The Burning Building begins with foreboding synths and pounding drums with a repeating piano motif overlaid. This gives way to violins carrying the melody and strings backing them; there’s no hint of guitars for an entire two minutes of the song. This bold move ensures that rather than being a guitar-based band backed by orchestrations and samples, it’s made abundantly clear that their sound is all-encompassing and folds in these elements to create something altogether cinematic in scope. Zarah takes its name from Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South, as it samples (with permission from her) the first speech she gave to parliament, decrying the climate struggle as a “class struggle across borders”, laying the blame squarely at the feet of the ultra rich and corporations and showing the effects of their greed will only hurt those least able to build the “ever higher walls” to protect themselves. These, along with Complicity, paint a bleak picture of where life on earth is heading if we don’t take rapid action.
Invincible Summer seems to hint at the current attitudes of too many; that humanity is invulnerable, no problem is too big to be solved and we can continue as we are without a care. As the song reaches its climax then fades out there’s a distinct sense of foreboding, one which Weight Of Light brings to the fore with its brass, looking out on the desolate world we’ve created. Meanwhile however, the strings peek out like shoots through soil as if to say that nature can heal. As the song accelerates this becomes an urgent call to action, balancing bleakness with a sense of beauty as it looks tentatively to a future that the younger generations bear the burden of fighting for.
But it isn’t all doom and gloom; even the album’s title hints at finding hope in such a dark place. No Feeling Is Final is an admission, an expectation almost, that this bleak outlook is, while not fleeting, not permanent. Lead single Refuturing ebbs and flows until its serene saxophone outro, the first glimpse of a better world. It’s in closer Tomorrow that the vision comes into focus, a hopeful, melodious piano welcoming a new dawn.
No Feeling Is Final is an album that sees MAYBESHEWILL reclaiming their throne as the undisputed champions of instrumental post rock. Its lush instrumentation and deeply emotional storytelling move from sadness to serenity. It’s also an encapsulation of the band’s own attitude to themselves; while once they thought it the end of them, they’ve realised that there’s still more for them to say, and that no feeling is final.
Rating: 9/10
No Feeling Is Final is out now via Robot Needs Home Collective.
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