Album Review: My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go by Aereogramme

Review Summary: A new direction for Aereogramme, My Heart Has A Wish... is beautiful and pulsating with excellence. Strings, piano, and clean guitar take a prominent role on the album, and it makes a fresh, new sound.Something tells me that this is not the album Aereogramme had in their minds when they went into the recording studio. Something had to give.

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The first words you hear on this exquisite album are "a potent mix of wonder and fear", which is a good description of how Aerogramme sound. The Glaswegians' music is enormous and epic, but with spiky edges and an intangible sense of creeping dread: the musical equivalent of gazing at a beautiful snowscape, knowing that any second, an avalanche could fall. Everything has been as lovingly crafted as a child's snowman, from the military drumming and glorious use of strings, choirs and pianos, to Craig B's stunning, heartfelt vocals.

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My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go doesn't quite abandon the directions taken on 2004's Seclusion EP or the previous year's full-length, psych-metallic Sleep and Release -- the overall extravagance remains, and Aereogramme still reaches for the sky -- but it does signal a turn toward a more thoughtful, artistically ambitious sound than before, not just maintaining the Scottish neo-prog quartet's penchant for forward movement but catapulting them out of minor-league status. Only half-a-dozen years earlier, on their 2001 debut A Story in White, Aereogramme was weighted down with elephantine guitars, bloated, plodding rhythms and an overcrowded production. Since then they've progressively relaxed a bit more each time out, thinking on a grander scale texturally but reserving their desire for grandiosity in favor of increasingly complex song structures, more expansive instrumentation and judicious use of the space and time at their disposal.

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