Far too often I find myself riffling through the piles of CDs that pour through my letterbox each morning and I fear for the survival of humanity. If the insipid runny rancid rubbish I have to listen to each day is a fair representation of what’s going on in the music world then we’re doomed - no longer will we be inspired by music to fall in love, no longer will we formulate frenzied fawning fanciful full-on feverish rants for the ears of friends. If we can’t fall in love with music we can’t fall in love with each other, and if we can’t dance then we can forget dancing horizontally. In short, if the daily outpouring of puss that press agents push out highlights the hippest happenings then we’ll all soon lose interest in music entirely. Never mind the argument concerning whether the Internet has killed the industry, if things continue down this putrid path we’ll be killing each other, there will be simply no other viable form of entertainment available to us.

As you can probably imagine, if it wasn’t for the occasional diamond in the dog dirt I would have quit this reviewing lark many years ago. It’s always just when I’m considering quitting for good, and am totally warn down by yet another press sheet that includes the line ‘best kept secret’ that something instantly restores my faith and gives me hope for the survival of our species. With a deep sigh I flipped “The Love Electric” by Sound & Shape into my CD player and with a heavy heart resigned myself to a few sad minutes of aural disappointment. The opening speed riffing guitar of the title track increased my fear that this would be yet another complex speed metal, math rock mess, but the photo of the band I’d seen just didn’t match that grubby vibe, they look, well, clean. Maybe not as clean as the Jonas Brothers, but certainly cleaner than say, Send More Paramedics or Dumpys Rusty Nuts (are they still going?)

Just as I was stroking my chin in the traditional reviewer dude fashion a high searing guitar solo note gave way to something I really wasn’t expecting, a tune. All instruments ceased and I was eased into the song proper by the kind of thick vocal harmonies that have kept the likes of The Doves in bread and butter for the last few years. There I was I was flipping the funny wee paddle thing on the bottom of my chair that allows me to recline to a suitable angle for proper absorption of these kinds of doings when I got a bit of a musical kick in the ribs. About a thousand slicing guitars slammed into me like velvet covered breeze blocks and I sat up like a metal loving Meer cat, threw up my horns and prepared for the inevitable shred fest, but it never came. This chunk of brutality was so brief I wondered if it had actually happened, or if that three day old pizza I just eaten had triggered some kind of brief stroke, albeit a cool rock and roll kinda stroke. While the vocal harmonies lull you into a false sense of security these semi brutal staccato stabs act like the meaty finger of a giant excitable hand tapping you (the listener) on the shoulder, a reminder to pay attention - there’s something exciting lurking in this song, something ready to explode at any minute.

The brutal crushing onslaught that these breaks portend never actually arrives; instead we’re treated to new musical parts to the song, each cooler and more complex than the one that came before. This trick of using many parts doesn’t detract from the song as a whole, it’s more the case that they come together to make the song more complete. Each time a new part is played out I find myself amazed it hadn’t been used already – here is a band that uses an album’s worth of ideas and finds a way to make them work in just a handful of tracks.

The rest of the EP continues in much the same vein but with a bewildering amount of creative spirit - there’s enough tuneage to make Sound & Shape totally accessible, and enough clever musical trickery to satisfy even the most demanding musophile. Sound & Shape have marked out their own territory in the difficult field of appealing to all comers, very few bands ever manage that, in fact I can only think of NoFX and Led Zeppelin as two other examples.

If I had to find fault in this EP - which I guess I do as I’m reviewing it - I’d say the lyrics are a little bit ‘teenage poetry’ in places. These are minor points, we were all teenagers once, and complaining about something like lyrics when the quality of the instrumentation is so high is a bit like eating a fine steak in a five star restaurant and complaining to the waiter that your shoes are too tight, it’s irrelevant and your friends will think you’re a knob.