I was asked recently what were our influences and came up with the easy choices (The Fall, VU, Sonic Youth, FSA, MBV, etc) but I said I might have been listening to Coltrane all week or Echo & The Bunnymen or Jackson Browne continuously and that may have had as much influence (Mike & Simon's choices excluded). Or when we did the recording I may have been more swayed by my daughter's singing or my son's rhythms on a chair.
It's obvious we've assimilated all the guitar noise we know, thrown out nearly all of it as it won't fit in the backpack, had a swig of Makers Mark and then taken the fork in the road. Therein life makes its footprint felt.

The tangled guitar line in 'A Copse of Trees' isn't going to come from Lee Ranaldo, though the sound might. In my mind all my guitar playing is Jackson Pollack.
Look at 'The Occult Soul Review'. Which oddly enough has turned out to be a commercial track in terms of getting us into Dandelion Radio's Festive 50 at number 3. It starts with bombastic riffage of sorts and goes into teaspoon noise before the hummable bass-line drops in and the completely meandering feedback riff shifts in it's chair like ants in its pants for the whole song, and Mike tells three stories in a dropped cards sort of sequence and by the end of the song my old fashioned is finally ready to drink.

Further down the path, the obvious choice for Manx poet laureate is Mr Mike Seed.
No question.