Beautiful Suns. Peaking Lights, Lucifer.


Connubial dub-pop luminaries Peaking Lights gone done good with estival breakthrough 936, the duo now accredited with quite the acclaim although a fair bit's changed since then. Irrevocable, existence-altering change. Namely, they now share a son. Yet whilst one may therefore anticipate a re-tweak of the bowel-disarranging bass now they've a baby on board (Miko tours as extensively as they) Lucifer is another devilishly inviting slab of shimmeringly disorientating, bottomed-out pop that almost whimsically tenses and relaxes your attention as though intangible mirage. The sound of water glimmering hypnotically within such fabricated vision, Lucifer represents a lucid flow that's as though the pair's shared stream of consciousness; a convergent vision of precisely where pop ought to reside in this day and age.

Hybridisms and hyphens aside, Peaking Lights quite ideally end up sounding like absolutely nobody else. Those motorik drum machine patterns; their wicked synth pitter pattering; Indra Dunis' oft disaffected, girly drawl all serve as lightly impressed hallmarks. The blippy undulations of Live Love, like a meandering tide, encapsulate all these elements as does the somewhat more corrosive Cosmic Tides, with both evincing Aaron Coyes' apparent appreciation for the both weird and wonderful ends of the figurative spectrum musical. It's stuff to loll off to in loft hotbox come sunrise, as is LO HI although at this juncture their trajectory is irreversibly shifted as baby Miko can be heard gurgling atop samples of reedy panpipe. Beautiful Son, of course a rather explicit tribute to their special little one, initially sounds akin to criminally undervalued '00s Ian Brown single before blowing wide open to expose a diced and immediately digestible piano refrain that's as ingenuously childlike as a dimly glowing, cot-mounted mobile. It's ingenious and perhaps the finest lullaby lingering in adult memory, whilst it simultaneously sounds as though it could quite conceivably have hummed from the aforenamed embellishment in the very first place, Dunis improvising jejune firstborn eulogies atop its swirling luminosity.

Riding high atop surfy guitars, it's not only the artistic acme of Lucifer but also, arguably, of the twosome's back catalogue and serves as apt double entendre. For Peaking Lights' seasonal pertinence – Lucifer getting a release that comes at what ought to meteorologically be precisely the right time of the season – is undeniable. Their time is now; they've become Peaking Lights in themselves, even if that great radiant spheroid up somewhere celestial is still nowhere to be seen.

Jamie Holloway.