wren - drive down lines/it grew from a stone in my heart
a new artist on melodic, nick peill (ie wren) comes from birmingham but has been consistently sending his sonic experiments to the melodic label until the boss finally relented, realising that nick was indeed worthy of being subjected to music lovers scrutiny, and, going by this initial release nick was indeed correct to hassle and push.
this is a wonderful track.
with its catchy straightforward melody the listener instantly feels connected to the broken bass line, the doubled up vocals, synths, and the driving twitchy beats. a few more listens reveals that scratch the surface, and this song could easily be wrapped up in usual indie guitar rock sounds and would probably be soaked up by the hoards who like belle and sebastian type of pleasantness. in the press release nick admits to being a fan of the shoegazing era of indie, which is apparent in the laidback but effective layered build up of the song. instead though, neil has chosen a far more interesting sonic path, where lovely warm electronica (are we stiill using folktronica phrase in 2004 .. i loose track of these things) are matched with the lazy sunday afternoon vocals. really good stuff.
the b-side (yes it is a real 7" single) is a lovely easy on the ear instrumental showing the other side to neils talents, as the forthcoming album is 50/50 spilt between songs and instrumentals.