maybeshewill – No Feeling Is Final: Album Review

By Mike Ainscoe on 16th November 2021 • ( Leave a comment )

Maybeshewill return from a lengthy absence with an independently produced meisterwork.

Release Date: 19th November 201

Label: Robot Needs Home Collective Label

Format: CD / vinyl / DL

It’s the band’s first new material since 2014’s Fair Youth. The intervening period saw the band work on ideas separately on sketches of music that would become No Feeling Is Final – the album that’s seen the band pull themselves back together. Building on the songs that they felt needed to be heard, together.

We’re told that the new album “was born from a place of weary exasperation. From the knowledge that we’re living in a world hurtling towards self-destruction. We watch as forests burn and seas rise.”

They certainly pull no punches, declaring their anger: “As the worst tendencies of humanity are championed by those in power; rage, fear, greed and apathy. We see every injustice, every conflict, every catastrophe flash up on our screens. We stay complacent and consume to forget our complicity in the structures and systems that sustain that behaviour. As the world teeters on the edge of disaster, we sigh and keep scrolling, the uneasy feeling in our stomachs eating away at us a little more each day.“

From that outlook, one might expect a set built on musical expression of angst and frustration particularly given the ominous opening to the sombre sounding We’ve Arrived At The Burning Building. However, the philosophy is much more positive. Thankfully. The overwhelming feeling of hopelessness is aside, the fear and frustration used instead to fuel something positive.

No Feeling Is Final is the maybeshewill message of hope and solidarity. Looking for a key moment, it could be summed up by Green Unpleasant Land. An almost folky ambience crossed with Mike Oldfield style arrangement combined with the title, suggest a lament for our nation, indeed the world. However, the piece develops with a soft choral vocal that along with the fragility of what sounds like a harp, works to seduce the listener. Even with the frenzied finale. By contrast, the easy flow of Even Tide is ever more relaxing, complete some a lone brass that floats atop the surface. The almost inevitable tsunami concludes to devastate any hope of refuge.

An album full of grand sweeps, acoustic episodes and delicate, distant rhythms vie with some towering Post Rock charges. Complicity and The Last Hours typically combine all. The latter’s clockwork pace provides the basis for brushstrokes that range from tentative to bold and outrageous. The Weight Of Light shifts gear too, from mournful and grey moods to pounding guitar and expansive strings before coming full circle.

The piano elegy that is Tomorrow brings down the curtain on an empowering reflection of the mood of the people of the earth. A reminder or even a plea to take action in shaping the world we leave for future generations. It’s a simple gesture of musical reassurance to anyone else struggling in these troubled times. Above all, engage and persist – Just keep going. Invest in refuturing. As they say, no feeling is final.

Here’s Green Unpleasant Land: