Album Review: Islet – Eyelet


Eyelet




Tucked away between the country’s more developed south and its rural north, mid-Wales is one of the most isolated parts of Britain: no motorways run through here, the nearest airports to the region’s most populous area of Newtown are in England, while on average less than a couple of hundred people a day use the train station in neighbouring Caersws.

Islet are Emma and Mark Daman Thomas, along with Alex Williams plus former Pictish Trail producer Rob Jones. They recorded the homophonically-titled Eyelet in the tranquil hills of Powys, as far from the madding crowd as possible. This relative solitude has had the effect of amplifying some of their influences – most obviously retro-arthouse beatniks Stereolab and Broadcast – and in turn gives their debut album a gentle strangeness, one which lingers coyly well after it’s gone.

In part, this funny peculiarity is naive and almost childlike, the detached, haunted vocals and elementary keyboard melody of opener Caterpillar occurring somewhere in a nearby dream, a flimsily walled palace which the quartet explore on the even more playful Moon.

This insouciance is far from Eyelet’s only dimension however, as it journeys (not always smoothly) between dextrous alt-pop and more jarring, experimental tones. Towards the latter, the chilly shuffle of Grief is rescued by its towering sub-operatic pan, while on Treasure the Thomases duet wistfully over a twinkling, analogue fresco.

Inevitably, the bucolic surroundings brought perspectives that shaped the music made in them. As a case in point, the majesty of rolling hills and greenery had a direct backwash into the near seven minutes of Geese, an impervious beauty witnessed by many eyes in the past but owned by no-one. The tune itself is anything but archaic however, an oblique angle set against centuries of stasis.

If that counts as something too impenetrable, there are plenty of other charms to embroil the listener: Sgwylfa Rock bounces with an adolescent, hip-hop flair, while Radel 10 – named after a tabla drum machine – rails against the bigotry of those in society whose stock response to the pleas of immigrants is to claim the soil they temporarily stand on for their own.

These notions of anger and tenderness don’t always translate. At their best though, Islet are out there and loveable, Florist hugging with its shonky distorted words and lush chorus, ‘You’ve got light/glowing out of your skin’, while No Host saddles Aphex techno phrases with blasts of smashing drums, thwacks of noise roared back into the thing that’s called life.

These hybrids – the notions of art, possessions, boundaries and culture being temporary walls – are sometimes obfuscated here, abstractions. On Eyelet, the idea that music can do what it takes nature an age to accomplish is revealed for the fantasy it is, but the alternative universe it occupies is accessible through either doors of imagination, or a lost turning somewhere off an unmarked country road.



7.5/10

Andy Peterson


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