Alternative
Popclaw / Rise Above Records · 2 October 2026
The record opens with its title track, three thirty-three, and fades out over a sitar left on its own: five people play at once, somebody turns the volume down, and that is the end of it. It was made that way, live in the studio with the minimum of overdubs, and you can hear it at once — the guitars come in slightly dirty and nobody cleaned them up afterwards. “Love You More” came out on 2 October on Popclaw, the Rise Above Records offshoot, a year and five months after the debut “…Is Forming”.
There are five people here and more instruments than hands: Alexandra Rose sings and plays guitar and mandola, Leon Jones handles lead guitar and electric sitar, Stuart Gray the organ, Ed Quigley bass and Huw Woodward drums. The album’s two best ideas come out of that surplus. “Circumstances” (four thirty-four) builds its drone from swarmandal and tanpura and simply stays there for the length of the song, resolving nothing. And “Room Without a View” (three twenty-six) starts in “Revolver” territory and ends in a twelve-bar shuffle led by the organ, the one moment on the record where the band sounds as though it had not planned what was about to happen.
“It’s Too Late” runs two fourteen and came out as a single last April. It is surf played fast and it is the shortest of the twelve.
Ten of the twelve tracks come in under three minutes forty, and the only one that really stretches is the closer, “Touch the Sun”, seven oh two, a raga spiral that Alexandra Rose describes as a piece that “questions the meaning of human existence”. All the band’s exploratory ambition is parked at the end, and the forty minutes before it run on a two-and-a-half-minute pop format that leaves them little room to do more than hint at it. The male-female vocal harmonies on “If I’m Right” (two forty-six) turn up on one track out of twelve.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre