Our editor’s pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past seven days is Eyelet from Islet – revisit the review and check out the album via Spotify!
“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.”