White Flowers - Day By Day

Debut album of grandiose dreampop melodrama from the Preston duo, making good on the huge promise displayed on the Within A Dream EP released earlier this year and those two now-impossible to find 12"s from 2020. Though mostly home recorded and self-produced with some assistance from one of the fellas from Doves, this is remarkably BIG sounding music, in much the same vein as Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Portishead et al, displaying very little evidence of its modest means of conception. DIY doesn't only mean lo-fi... The diaphanous guitar sounds and crystalline melodies are pretty and affecting on their own, but it's really singer Katie Drew's expressive range that brings them into bloom, seesawing between delicately intoned verses and sky searching emotive choruses, its own monochromatic blast of light and shade. There's at least six songs here you can imagine as standalone singles you'd hear on the radio (well, in a fair world), but mostly it's the atmosphere they create as a whole that sticks with you longest - tense, dramatic, alone and slightly adrift in the night. by means of introduction it's sort of peerless in the UK this year, free of the hackneyed 'post-punk' signifiers hanging albatros-like around the necks of most other new music and immersed in its own fragile glass world.