Superbly crafted, innovative ‘art-pop for the anthropocene’ by the innovative British artist, with landscaped sounds in a whirlpool of clever invention, narratives threading through an existential lifespan of gorgeous turns through this follow-up to 2021’s Great Spans of Muddy Time. Fluidity in form, with watery metaphor and subject matter is an ongoing theme, perhaps in part influenced by co-producing with Mike Lindsay (of Tunng and LUMP) at his MESS studio in Margate, the wash of tides and beautiful whorls in the simmering and gurgling of electronica, with a lovely touches of instrumentation, including collaborations with Alexander Painter, Genevieve Dawson and Brian Eno.
Each song has a first-person narrative, Doyle experimenting with the notion of different selves in a sensory, confusing world, an “unimaginable time of runaway climate destruction and technological expansion”. There are many deliciously clever highlights, from the gorgeous, fragile falsetto and bird twittery acoustic awakening of Garden of the Morning, to the bendy, clicky, catchy rock of Now In Motion then moving into the superb Relentless Melt, to the melty gentle minimalism of Soft To The Touch. The mid-part of the album has a quieter, folkier, more stripped-back feel, particularly going into Castawayed. But then it swells again into the splendid energy and echoey Radiohead-ish abandon of Surrender Yourself, before the lifecycle suddenly has a A Short Illness. The narrative moves inexorably to a rippling, exquisite death and perspective the final tracks, A Long Life and then the winged reverie of Because of A Dream. Brilliant, beautiful, tender, wistful, life-affirming work, and by the end of 2024 will surely resurface as a year’s highlight. Out on Tough Love Records.
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