Probably every article or review ever written about Life Without Buildings focuses on Sue Tompkins and her vocals, and to be honest so will this one; but I’d like to start with a plea for consideration on behalf of the rest of the band. Will Bradley on drums, Chris Evans on bass, Robert Johnston on guitar—even their names and instruments sound kind of boring. But from the opening notes of Life Without Buildings sole LP Any Other City they burst into life, poised halfway between jangle and angle, post-rocking around the clock. A large degree of the interest, the drive, the life in Life Without Buildings’ sound comes from their singer, yes, but if they’d released an instrumental version of the album it would still be good music. Not great, which is what it is with Tompkins, but good, which is more than you can say for many of their contemporaries.

Their work is in fact the necessary precondition for Tompkins’ post-Mark E. Smith verbal fireworks, that network of stutters, repetitions and obliques that sound like normal communication after almost distressingly few spins. Bradley’s double thumps let her yell with twice the power, Evans and Johnston melding together into one unified melodic engine, filling in the cracks and colouring slightly outside the lines. And then Tompkins wades in the stream of her consciousness, and although some themes come through (heartbreak, leaving, moving; “Sorrow,” “New Town,” “Let’s Get Out”) the whole story remains walled up in her head, or maybe in her life. It’s the kind of tantalizing almost-narrative that makes us invent stories to explain them, sometimes wonderful ones. That kind of opacity can turn into adaptability, though, a kind of emotional malleability that means Life Without Buildings’ music means more to you than anything more specific could.

“Juno” is a song about “you,” whoever that is. It is long, it is changing, she is angry at you and she might love you and she wonders if you’re real and a million more things. And in the middle, after the gently cryptic opening and before the exhausted end, is the moment. There’s a build-up, of course. The song has gone through two parts that might be verses and a couple of other, similar parts that might be a chorus, and the music drops down and Tompkins whispers “Don’t be fearful / Don’t be fearful to me.” And then as the band surges steadily around her, Tompkins starts fixating on a single phrase: “My lips are sealed.” She sing/shouts it with heedless abandon, pitched between anger and joy as the bass hums and the drums ratatat and Johnston plays a little like the Byrds if they’d heard Tortoise. It’s enthralling, fall-in-love stuff, just like on “New Town” when she starts taunting the listener with the words “Lookin’ in your eyes!” But this time it feels more like being filled with happiness, like you’ve been sworn to silence about the best secret ever.

And then, between repetitions of the line, Tompkins does it—she shouts out “I can see you!” in a half mockingly sing-song, half thrilled to death voice. It’s such an innocuous thing to say, the delivery carrying connotations of catching someone during childhood hide-and-seek, and in the middle of the glee of the refrain it’s suddenly the most perverse life affirming thing ever. It takes you back to a time and place and mood where things just feel right, where you see that person and you know they’re all you need for now. It makes me want to run outside and make snow angels, or run down a hill or play a game of tag. Life Without Buildings aren’t twee and neither is “Juno,” but there’s a clean-limbed joie de vivre in the middle of it that makes the city make more sense, that can’t exist apart from the heartache of the end of the album, just as Tompkins would be merely annoying without the almost invisible but crucial support of the music, four parts making one whole.

[buy stuff here]