Since c.2005, Leicester (UK)’s Maybeshewill have curated their art in that strange netherworld of post-rock with a sense of style, passion and insight that is to be applauded. Fair Youth (Superball), their latest opus, cements and embellishes an already enviable reputation for compelling music that initially appears throwaway and easily dispensable but, following repeated listens, reveals genuine warmth, depth and soul.

Fair Youth, like its predecessors, is an album of instrumental tracks, each with their own structure, melody and percussive dynamics. Surprisingly for an album of this kind, it works remarkably well as a whole piece. There isn’t a narrative arc beloved of progressive music fans but there is a discernible ebb and flow to the record that keeps you hooked from the off. Maybeshewill have an insightful understanding how one’s own mind can wander and drift whilst listening to music. Self-evidently, the absence of a vocalist makes it more challenging to give a straightforward appreciation of the themes and “meaning” of these songs but, actually, this doesn’t matter as they have enough collective intelligence and credit their audience with enough intelligence to discern the meaning through the physical act and pleasure of actually listening closely to the music they have created.

At first listen, you get the sense that this might be a band in a much happier place than suggested by, for example, Not For The Want of Trying’s ‘He Films The Clouds Part 2’ or the mournful ‘Words for Arabella’ on I Was Here For a Moment. The album’s lead off track, ‘Amber’, with a heightened presence of keyboards, seems to reinforce this. However, repeated listens suggest that the initial impression may not be quite right and that there remains a deep melancholy, a melancholy that is being masked by the ostensibly cheery melodies that we are initially grabbed by.

Whatever this writer’s sense of the album’s “meaning” is largely irrelevant. What is unquestionable is solid evidence of a band that have continued to grow in confidence and style, a band with an unerring ability to conjure addictive tunes and melodies from their proverbial locker. By way of example, the insistent beat that architects the addictive ‘All Things Transient’, a simple hook repeated and built upon to a thrilling crescendo. Similarly, the simple keyboard that drives the charming ‘Asiatic’or the plaintive ‘Permanence’ both give credence to the view that the band could do this sort of thing in their sleep if they wanted to, such is the apparent effortlessness of it all.

Fair Youth has plenty of hooks and musical vignettes to keep even those with the shortest of attention spans enraptured and beguiled over the course of its forty or so minutes of aural bliss. Fair Youth is a terrific album, the sort of record you can recommend to your friends and, perhaps, even one or two of your enemies.

8.0/10.0

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MAT DAVIES