“Close your eyes,” comes the whisper of Alison Garner, crooning about slow motion, a sensitivity easier to identify with your eyes opened. It’s not a chorus, but she gravitates to the phrase again and again, each time plummeting deeper into a heady motion sickness, pitch black save for momentary flashes of synth and the whirring lights of background static. ‘Mixtape Days’, the opening track of Brisitolian shoegazers The Fauns’ first album in a decade, is named after vodka-fuelled Camden nights in the late 1980s, at the height of indie and new wave: “Seventeen years old, eyes obscured by hair, ripped jeans, pushing through the crowd, headphones on, lost in the delay.” It’s a rare example on How Lost where the four piece lingers too long on the absolutes within their lyricism. They needn’t be so descriptive; when the album runs free, it’s a total dislocation of the senses, dripping with enough colour to obscure the straight lines erected around their abstracts.
‘Afterburner’ is a highlight, cramming digitised hi-hats and crashes around a kitsch gameshow riff, broken by Garner’s Elena Tonra-like earnestness. ‘Doot Doot’, too, holds a magnetically quiet euphoria before folding into synthetic strings: exaggerated versions of this would have sports broadcasters on their knees. New wave sensibilities heightened – indicative of adding guitarist-come-acclaimed composer Will Slater to the line-up – hordes of seemingly disparate dots are connected with a strange alchemy. Side A is an occasional left turn to Enya and Sonique as readily as it recalls primetime Cocteaus, whereas Side B plays with an uncannily industrial brightness. It’s an unpredictably varied delight.
