It's as exhilarating as anything to have been committed to black wax of late and although scraped off the chopping room floor upon which previous effort IRM was carved, it's an astonishingly cohesive wrangle of perfectly multifarious tracks. The bass-led, Beck-featuring (and therefore dreamily produced) Paradisco sounds like the ageless Debbie Harry fronting heavenly, if sparse lo-fi jive while the warped break-up slump of Got To Let Go inexplicably manages to neutralise the usually unsupportable dry and nasal moping of Noah and the Whale's Charlie Fink. Predictably preferable is the segueing Out of Touch featuring bat-shit, hay-haired Kiwi Connan Mockasin whose woozy psychedelia is graciously draped over a truly splendiferous duet of Sinatra-like nonpareil; All The Rain meanwhile rumbles to a rhythm equatable to that which once whipped the rip-roaring Trick Pony into a sprightly sense of being before it in turn darts off towards a distinctly more macabre distance. The general despondence of loathsome loneliness is captured and encapsulated in the baroque propensities of the intermittently astral White Telephone, while the slapped acoustic desolation renowned of Villagers' Conor J. O'Brien is married to sumptuously mellifluous, Piaf-like cooed narrative during Memoir. As jaunty as the overwhelming cliché of breton-breasted garçon français rolling insouciantly down gentle inclines on a ramshackle vélo, raw garlic and perfumed baguette bobbing in basket, amidst omnipresent January desperation and despair Stage Whisper provides "the lighthouse to my broken boat".
