Underwater Sleeping Society are back from their hiatus with their fourth full-length album Instrumental Healthcare, their first since 2008’s Dead Vegas and it’s a nice easy listen with a good ‘airy’ quality to it.
Everything about the album just feels “nice”; it’s an inoffensive piece of work that has a good flow to it, with Underwater Sleeping Society almost gliding from one track to the next, and the musical performance is gentle and unintrustive. Each track is well-constructed, and a particularly strong element of the album is the vocal delivery – there’s a controlled, smooth feeling to them as a whole, and they work well at directing the listener through the eleven songs.
However on the other hand, Instrumental Healthcare is not an album that will necessarily invoke a strong reaction in you – at times it has a somewhat wishy-washy feel to it and doesn’t feature any lines or performances that will really stay with you after the album has come to a close. It’s an enjoyable album, but just not the most memorable piece out there. It’s nice enough, but works better as background music than as a fully immersive listen.
6/10
