The London eight-piece experimental group return three years after their self-titled debut, with a stop-start, meandering, sometimes challenging but also magical album of interweaving vocals and analogue instruments – guitars, trombone, violins and more, but also electronica – and a guest appearance from Caroline Polachek. Her lead on Tell Me I Never New That spearheads a beautiful folk-pop, multi-part, shimmering centrepiece, with an accompanying video collaging video from the phones of many friends into a euphoric sense of nostalgia. Overall the album feels like a unpredictable sketchbook of ideas, constantly playing with pop references but breaking them up again. Opener Total Euphoria begins with changing tempo of guitar strums, another guitar taking an entirely different tempo, and the drums taking different third, throughout creating strangely alluring if constantly wrong-footing effect. Song Two throws up that obvious reference to Blur’s fuzz-guitar, whooping Britpop classic, but is absolutely the opposite in rhythm and style to that song, and nor is Coldplay Cover anything like the coffee-table produce of those mainstream artists. This is slow, jangling, delicate, folky, strummy, trombone-sliding, slow-prog, introverted experimentalism of voices and sections interweaving, repeating, ebbing, swelling, fading and re-emerging, especially on U R Ur Only Aching, or Two Riders Down. Meanwhile When I Get Home eccentrically, but also qutie cleverly brings the distant sound of a club beat banger in an imagined basement below to distract from its own opposite journey. Caroline could be seen as a bit of a Marmite musical taste, wondrously freeform, but also occasionally quite ponderous and arguably indulgent. That said, it perhaps depends on mood and expectation. The album ends a strangely beautiful, atmospheric note, or indeed a cascade of notes, with Beautiful Ending, a number that, although while some minor vocal distortions might jar a tad, does indeed self-describe with some delicate accuracy, if never predictably so. Out on Rough Trade.
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