Although, as a Newcastle resident, I feel enormously spoilt by our selection of bands, I must confess that I’ve always been just a tiny bit jealous of gig-going folk in Leeds, a city which seems to spawn another outrageously creative band every three days. Take The Pattern Theory for example, a band who are now Berlin-based, but whose roots are unmistakably Leodensian. Sound-wise, their closest kin would probably be the likes of Explosions in the Sky (or, if you’ll permit me to carry on the Leeds motif, maybe Vessels). While they don’t employ the world-endingly noisy crescendos of those two, the record is brimming with familiarly undulating swells of melodic build-up. The band build hypnotic little patterns of melody and deconstruct and rebuild them at their leisure, with Framed Fields the best example of this, starting off all plaintive and achy before it almost imperceptibly picks up the pace and turns into something more urgent. The overall result is an enormously listenable and beautifully eloquent instrumental album with an impact that is undeniably softer than that of its forebears, but which is no less enriching for that. One of the best debut records that will emerge this year.4/5
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