Gentlemen, Start Your Engineers

"There’s something about a mood album that’s designed to seep into the consciousness,” guitarist/co-lyricist Mark Peters of Engineers is saying. We’re talking about how his band’s self-titled debut album is, in our opinion, one of those LPs you sink into: the equivalent of lighting a fire and cocooning into a favourite blanket.

“And then there’s another type of mood album that’s for playing at a dinner party,” he continues, less approvingly. “And I hope our album isn’t created for a social situation where people sit around discussing it. I hope it’s something much more organic, really. It should be felt, as opposed to analysed.”
So we’re talking comfort listening. And, to be specific, comfort albums from that ilk of bands whose music, like Engineers’, is modern, MIDI-assisted, quasi-artificial, but whose hard-wired origins somehow make them feel all the more warm, tactile, human, in a Blade Runner kind of way. Tracks like ‘New Horizons’ possess the slightly sorrowful, transmitted-from-deep-space atmosphere of Air, as well as the pleasantly opiated drug-vision quality of... ahem, Pink Floyd.
“Oh, that’s great,” Mark sighs. Then he guffaws. “I know Pink Floyd are a bit of a laughingstock at the current time – and it's not something that I listen to myself – but we all definitely grew up with it, in our teens."
Lest Floydophobes run like the wind away from this lovely album, however, we must report that more than anything, Engineers’ self-titled debut makes us think of the gentle, life-on-other-planets-courting sci-fi experimentalism of Broadcast, the aforementioned plastic elegies of Air and the happy-sad, forever-summer quality of the Beach Boys. Comprised of four friends from in and around London who’ve punched the clock in various other bands throughout their twenties, Engineers strike us as the sort of matureish, humble, emotional band you’d have found on the Lost in Translation soundtrack – not one of the distinctive ‘anchor’ bands of that release, like your Airs or your Mary Chains, but one of the rest, who make up the overall mood of the record and indeed of the film (a suggestion with which Mark wistfully agrees: “When that film came out, it was like, ‘Oh my god. We were almost made to do that’”). The band’s lyrics, he concurs, are impressionistic, not that important: feeling is everything.
“You completely hit the nail on the head there,” Mark says of my Beach Boys suggestion. “On the face of it, they sound really, you know, bright and happy, and then there’s this sense of... longing but none of it’s ever discussed in the lyrics. I think that’s the beauty of the Beach Boys. We’re massive, massive Beach Boys fans.
“We travelled around California a few years ago, and that massively influenced us. We drove down the coast, and it was just about feeling the landscape, as opposed to the society and stuff. There’s something about... It’s got an end-of-the-earth kind of feeling. I think that’s where a lot of their sort of melancholy comes from. It really stayed with us.”

Engineers’ self-titled debut album is out now on Echo.