Coldharbourstores - Dearly Devoted - Enraptured Records - LP/DD/CD
For 20 years-plus, London-based dream-pop outfit Coldharbourstores have been quietly and ethereally carving a small notch on life's musical bedpost without truly setting the world alight. If previous album Vesta was a step nearer to the band perfecting the complexities familiar to this style of music, fourth album Dearly Devoted has almost nailed it.
Produced by experienced collaborator Graham Sutton and dressed in another 4AD-informed sleeve by Martin Andersen, Dearly Devoted has absorbed all the best bits from the band's preceding trio of non-too-shabby long-players and sprinkled a healthy pinch of fairy dust across the tracks.
Strangely it's the sprightly opening song ZERO that detracts from the rest of the set - this is Coldharbourstores getting unexpectedly jaunty with carefree abandon and a host of neat hooks and touches that evoke both bleak wide-open spaces and sun-soaked beaches in equal measure.
Second track Amber is set in more familiar territory though this is not a bad thing by any means. Lucy Castro's fragile voice sits somewhere between later-period Kate Bush and Young Marble Giants' Alison Statton and is more suited to slower songs like this. Think Blue Nile, Clannad and Bush at their most minimal and you're someway there with Amber and a few other tracks like the gorgeous Litmus which deserves the inevitable comparison to Cocteau Twins circa Milk and Kisses and the chiming ballad Love Theme.
Perhaps a contender for a radio single would be the rather widescreen and pretty Big Deal, while Starstruck gets the album's mixed second-half back on track with its angelic choral backing and sweetly-trilled verse. Acoustic closer Pining continues the Cocteau comparison without too much over-harmonising - in short, it's a dreamy curtain-call for Coldharbourstores' most charming and consistent album to date.
★★★★★★★½