The Soundcarriers - Celeste 2LP (RSD2023)

There's something intangible about Celeste, The Soundcarriers second album released in 2010. It has a light, lucid quality almost like driving exhausted through a strange city at night. Free-flowing yet tethered, dreamy yet attacking, the band continue the fight to reconcile competing impulses. Various threads just about keep the shimmering tapestry from tearing - Haunting folk melodies underpinned by rhythmic static and the physicality of the totally analogue recording and mixing, baroque keyboard counterpoints and sweeping arrangements. The opener Last Broadcast seems to encapsulate this but it's almost as if the album gets the angst out of it's system with this track and is free to explore the quieter, less crowded back streets. After the smoke of Last Broadcast has cleared, the twisting road takes in the soft introspection of Hideaway and Morning Haze, both tracks morphing into heavy psyche grooves or the eastern tinged psyche funk of Signals and Rise And Fall. Or takes another turn with the tightly arranged opening segment of Long Highway. Somehow it still manages to fit in 60s pop gems like There Only Once.

An album to really lose yourself in, yet more concise than the sprawling Harmonium and more relaxed and free-flowing than the nervy rush of Entropicalia, Celeste could be arguably their most indispensable album and not to damn it with faint praise, their most listenable.