Spacial Awareness. Bear In Heaven, I Love You, It's Cool.

Channeling that culturally ambiguous, almost androgynous spanking pop sheen smeared all over the last few Phoenix records, John Philpot's third full-length under his Hometapes-housed Bear In Heaven guise, I Love You, It's Cool is a gently affecting, lukewarm mush of evanescent synths and enveloping drones. An album devoid of precise place and definitive time, if perhaps not timeless Philpot has promptly thrust forth the exact sort of record 2012 could be professed to be predestined for.

I Love You, It's Cool certainly feels as blithe and blasé as its title may intimate, the breezy, spacious Kiss Me Crazy and the cosmic pop propensities of Sinful Nature cementing such impression. It's the record many anticipated of Tanlines, only to ultimately be left feeling indelibly scorched by the reddened iron of chagrin once Mixed Emotions was eventually outed: expansive and exponentially so, it's one to drift off to; to get lost in as if freely drifting earthwards only to reawaken in the equally buoyant environs of the lukewarm daze that is the Dead Sea. Cool Light may be ostensibly branded Love Like a Sunset Part IV – albeit a volume sprinkled with hundreds and thousands of synth glimmers – whilst the introductory brace of Idel Heart and The Reflection Of You glides atop a wave of stainless, curvaceous steel. Noon Moon meanwhile nods to the blustery pianistic melodrama of Tears For Fears, again displacing I Love You, It's Cool from incontestable timeframe however it's not all insouciant sweet nothings here, to which the intergalactic splurge of Space Remains attests as it recalls HEALTH at their delectably wicked best. For further subversive frisson, try entrancing closer Sweetness & Sickness during which bongo pitter-patter regulates the slow yet unabatingly steady sloshes of ambiguous vocal. The central sensations of the extraterrestrial are here manifested most punctiliously amidst Jovian squawks however it's this spacial awareness that renders the record a little vapid emotionally. For although punctuated by some quite sublime vacant stretches, allowing clacks and guitars and synth gurgles to reverberate as though their jostle with every particle to drift through our atmosphere were succinctly encapsulated in aural format, I Love You, It's Cool prompts little of the intense human response the primary segment of its title may suggest.