"A big part of Odyshape's charm is derived from its backwards construction, with the band leaning away from the spikiness that made The Raincoats such an inviting listen, and writing many of the songs without percussion. The tribal drumming of original member Palmolive was forcibly removed from the mix-- she quit the band by the time of this record, causing percussion to be added after the fact by a variety of guest players including Robert Wyatt and This Heat's Charles Hayward. Coloring in the songs in that manner might sound like the band were shoving a square peg in a round hole, but it undoubtedly contributed to the uniquely disorienting air that Odyshape thrives on. It's from a place where the Raincoats' best ideas stem-- throwing orthodoxy out of the window, playing on instruments with which they weren't familiar, assembling all the parts back to front because the standard way of doing things held little or no interest.

As such, it fits into that basic post-punk tenet of rejecting everything that came before to test out new ways of doing things. This album has little in common with anything else around at the time, other than the feeling that you're hurtling relentlessly forward into a previously unmapped musical space. There may be a little Scritti-esque hue to the guitar scratch on the pushy "Only Loves at Night", but much of Odyshape is positioned in a peculiar place somewhere between the earth and the sky. Sometimes a discordant violin howl is pitted against dreamy vocal pining ("Dancing in My Head"), at others the relationship is reversed and the singing takes on an earthy tone while the instrumentation is positively otherworldly ("Shouting Out Loud"). Occasionally those two impulses are conjoined, such as on the title track, where Birch delves into body dysmorphia over stop-start rhythms that feel like two different songs colliding."

- Nick Neyland, Pitchfork