The Sonic Disruptions of a Heavenly Plane

Starring

Blanco White, C Duncan, Optometry, Shapes Like People, Stella Donnelly

The Front Runners

Tickling Haze : Shapes Like People

Oh, this is good. Soaring, jangly indie pop that is guaranteed to warm and brighten your day.

This album came about when Carl Mann (from The Shop Window) wrote some demos and needed some female vocals to pitch to other artists, and asked Kat to sing and replace his guide vocals. He couldn’t bring himself to part with the songs when he heard the results. From such happy accidents, magic is made!

Forget Sonny and Cher or Ike and Tina, Shapes Like People are living proof that husband and wife duos can bring perfect harmony, and harmonies to music. They are to pop, what the Gulf Stream is to weather when it brings warmth, the calm after storms and the sun breaking through clouds. (Any meteorologists reading this don’t need to get in touch if it’s not technically correct about what the Gulf Stream brings.)

These songs jangle addictively, tempered by a sustained something that lends the songs a light shoegaze veneer and still allows them to float free. The vocals come to you as if from a siren (mermaid, not foghorn) calling across oceans, luring you into the record. The melodies and harmonies linger and you’ll linger with them. The songs have the kind of grace that glides and soars effortlessly, and they’ll carry you along.

You’ll hear nothing more jangly than ‘Ambition Is Your Friend’ this year. I’ve heard whistling on songs many times, but not built as successfully into an earworm as they are on ‘Head Spun’. There’s something of the best 80s indie pop to ‘When The Radio Plays’ that calls out for an extended 12” remix. It makes something that in lesser hands could sound tired and cliched into something special.

‘Linger’ by The Cranberries is a touchstone. The Bangles around the time they were going down to Liverpool are another. There’s the musical depth that featured in Lush’s shoegaze days too. They’ve captured the kind of relationship in song that characterises the best songs from The Beautiful South, and Paul Heaton’s solo work.

If, as they sing on this album, ‘The Ship Is Soon To Sail ‘ be sure not to miss it.

Taster Track : Ambition Is Your Friend

Flood : Stella Donnelly

Stella Donnelly’s songs feel grounded in real life, and are full of a personality brimming with great tunes.

She had a critical hit with her 2019 debut ‘Beware of the Dogs’. If you heard that, you’ll know that her Aussie charm is refreshing, open and funny. All of that remains here, but it’s tempered by a thoughtful maturity trickling through these songs. There aren’t many moments when you’ll laugh out loud as you may have done to the sweary ‘Festive Greetings’, but there are definitely moments where you will wish you’d had her way with words to express your feelings.

Donnelly lives in the real world, surrounded by friends, family and partners who fall short of perfection. There’s uncertainty, hope, disbelief and cautious emotion running through all these songs. They’re the thoughts of a late twenty something who feels that whilst life may not be a constant laugh, it’s something to keep in proportion. Despite, or maybe because of this, there’s a smidgeon of sadness there too.

‘How Was your Day?, ‘Restricted Account’ ‘Lungs’ and ‘Move Me’ - these indie pop songs all typify the album’s determination not to rely on attitude and energy at the expense of good tunes. ‘Medals’ is a song that unfurls as it goes, growing before your ears. The stripped back sound of ‘Underwater’ emphasises just how good these songs are. It’s a brave move, with the confidence to take risks and lay bare her true feelings, muddled and confused though they may be. ‘Lungs’ is a beautifully crafted song, vocally and musically.

Don’t worry though, she has a bucketful of easy melodies to wash down any sadness and her armoury of ‘Ta-da-da-das’, ‘La, la las’ and cooking backing vocals is second to none.

This is an album to relax into and take to heart, while hoping that she’s OK.

Taster Track : Lungs

The Chasing Pack

Tarifa : Blanco White

This haunting and serious collection of songs has a real mix of influences that make for a fascinating and, at times, enchanting listen.

It’s a rich sound, flavoured by a musical gene pool that makes something both familiar and unique. It’s familiar in the echoes you can pick up, unique in that you’re unlikely to have heard that blend of echoes before.

In ‘Giordano’s Dream Pt 1’ those echoes carry shades of Gregorian chants in the way they compel you to listen. Blanco White trained in flamenco guitar. That’s there too, but as part of the mix, not as its defining taste. Now it gets a little stranger because in seeking comparisons I was pulled towards prog rock sources. That’s not a label that’s often attached to singer songwriters, but it fits here.

Hardest to define is the sense of a small niche of 80s music that was not world music and not soft rock but could have been claimed by both. They’re songs that would be jewels, buried deep in the heart of carefully curated compilations full of album artists. Then, you’d have to dig to find them. Now, Blanco White can claim 1.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and a presence on Spotify’s ‘The Most Beautiful Songs In The World’ playlist, and deservedly so. If you want songs capable of stopping you in your tracks, Blanco White has them.

Blanco’s a tenor. That’s not just a factual description of his pitch and register, but testimony to his craft and skill too. His voice has a similar mix of echoes. It bends slightly like David Sylvian, carries the seriousness of Sting’s solo years and, sometimes, transfixes you like Geoffery Gurrumul.

This is music where the only fault is perhaps that it has too much beauty in it. It’s music for hushed, reverential, concert hall listening. It draws you in, excluding the world around you. So it’s not suitable for, say, driving long distances around city centres but is best kept for when you finally arrive home and need to unwind.

Music deserves to be taken seriously, and Blanco White is one example of why this is so.

Taster Track : Green Eyes

It’s Only A Love Song : C Duncan

With this album C. Duncan transports you back to the golden age of Hollywood’s orchestral crooners.

Duncan has delved into chamber pop in earlier albums, but ‘It’s Only a Love Song’ is much more than that. Here you have a man whose heart is in the music of the 30s and 40s, fronting a full on orchestra and backing choir. Listening to this is to experience an idealised past world, where romance and sentimentality trump cynicism and brutality every time.

And what a sense of romance! It sweeps and swoons at you, triggering images of black and white ensemble pieces that seem to come from warm clouds overlooking the Golden Age of Hollywood. You half expect to see David Niven and Deanna Durbin at the top of a sweeping marble staircase. Turning to this deeply romantic production, it’s no surprise to learn that Duncan is recently married.

Like Richard Hawley with his immersion in the feel of 1950s song styles, Duncan has committed wholeheartedly to his chosen approach. He describes himself as a composer. That’s telling, for his composition and arrangement skills are spot on and at the heart of this album.

For some it could be too much, like finishing the last cake of a lavish cream tea. Ths closest we come to the modern age is on ‘Surface of a Fantasy’ where the bouncier feel is reminiscent of the 60s and 70s work of the Mike Sammes Singers. For many, though, this could be a delirious and delicious immersion in a larger than life sumptuous world. It’s an easy comparison, but you can also hear the bygone age that Peter Skellern has sometimes visited.

From beginning to end, this is an impeccably realised vision, with just the right amount of modern production - for example the reverb on ‘The Space Between Us’ - to create the sense of the songs coming from another dream world.

There’s nothing like this most traditional set of songs from a 1930s songbook that I’ve heard in pop for decades. Ironically, that makes it the most alternative thing I’ve heard for some time too.

Taster Track : It’s Only A Love Song (or its Reprise)

Lemuria : Optometry

This duo from Los Angeles take you on an electronic trip to some dark places, but offer enough light touches to keep you on board with their journey.

John Tejada is responsible for the production and electronic elements here. March Adstram provides the vocals and guitar. Lemuria is a continent theorised to have sunk beneath the Indian Ocean. That theory was discredited by the idea of continental drift, but these songs try to convey the human trauma that might be associated with the disappearance of your entire world.

Initially, I felt that the vocals and music didn’t fully align. They still sounded great on ‘Inside A Wire’ and ‘Starcrossed’ but you felt they were singing a part and apart.

I was wrong, because that changes around ‘Fear (Is the Mind Killer)’. Things take a harder, post traumatic feel with a harder, colder, metallic edge. ‘99’ is more ice than ice cream. Some of the song titles are the defensive titles of a world or life under attack. Try ‘Inside A Wire’, ‘Fear (Is the Mind Killer)’, ‘Target Practice’, ‘Antidote’ and ‘Another Shield’ for the merest hint of a battered mindset.

Their Spotify bio describes March Adstram’s voice as ethereal. I have to take issue with that. ‘Ethereal’ to me suggests something wispy and dream-like, the sound of Liz Fraser in the Cocteau Twins. Adstram’s vocals are deeper than that, dragging in the sound of The Cure and Joy Division if they had stayed off New Order’s dance track.

It’s not all doom and despair. Whereas ‘Antidote’ may feel like a slow grind, ‘Inside A Wire’ and ‘Star Crossed’ contain a tense urgency, good rhythms and more than decent tunes to prevent any any stagnation. ‘Bon Voyage’ is the sound of music stabilising itself, ready for rebuilding and both that song and ‘;Another Shield’ offset the downbeat feel elsewhere.

This is an inventive album, unlike anything else. That invention helps to prevent the album being cursed with the ‘difficult’ label.

Taster Track : Inside A Wire