SHIPPING NEWS - Flies The Fields

Here we are at yet another episode of the young-dinosaurs saga, which we'd recommend only to an audience already vaccinated by at least 10 years of exposure to indie-rock, post-rock, math-rock and assorted relatives.

And yes, because Shipping News are veterans - noble ones, but veterans nonetheless - jealous keepers of a sound that's already been filed away, cross-contaminated, yet by now anachronistic in its archetypal form.

That said, nothing stops us from approaching the record with as open a mind as possible, perhaps taking it out of the flow of musical evolution altogether, and simply judging it on the pleasure of its compositions, production and arrangements.

So what should we expect from Mueller, Noble & company?

Well, the usual well-played, irregular rock: jagged here, a bit more velvety there, sometimes instrumental, sometimes sung, halting melodies, proto-progressive variations and so on.

Not that Shipping News have ever shone for originality; the near-revolutions, the real ones, happened over in the parent bands (Rodan, June of 44), but we do give them credit for the ability to build solid compositions out of that narrow sonic/semantic niche that is post-rock - a vague label, but a perfectly meaningful one.

The Shipping News of "Flies The Fields" are the same as ever, perhaps slightly more emotional, as in the ballad "Untitled w/Drums", with plenty of quiet passages and rusty, clattering guitar work pared down to a minimum.

"Axons and Dendrites" kicks things off superbly with over five minutes of driving rhythm, somewhere between the over-revved engines of Neu! and Tortoise trying to humanize "Djed".

There's no escaping it: the references and the direct or indirect influences all point back to one very specific sonic universe, with a "Louven" that recalls the lesson of Slint and Rachel's in a Walkeresque melodic line dressed in melancholy, cutting a fine figure on "The Sea And The Bells".

In truth, it's the melodies that really stand out here, more so than on previous records, so the listen flows by pleasant and painless, as on "It's Not Too Late", where guitars set the stage for a Mogwai-esque explosion that does arrive, but lightly, almost velvety - martial, yes, but violent only in potential.

Ok, ok, forget I said anything; I could go on boring you about the rest of the tracks, banging on about the Louisville-Chicago axis, Sonic Youth, Unwound, Don Caballero and the like, but luckily for you I won't - by now you'll surely have understood just what kind of beast "Flies The Fields" is.

So, in conclusion, if you need a cheat sheet to decode the coordinates of the past decade's post-rock, this record is exactly what you're looking for; if, on the other hand, you're a hungry explorer in search of the next sonic evolution, feel free to move right along.

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30/04/2026