Album Review: Love Connection Euphoria

10 April 2012 | 12:07 pm | Chris Yates

Although mostly indiscernible, the lyrics are included in the artwork and are bleak and borderline suicidal.

Never before has an album title so accurately described the sound of the music hidden within its glorious cover. The introductory swirl of Piezoelectric is all guitar swirls, backwards vocals and unforgettable ambience mushed together so wonderfully it's hard to tell where one sound begins and the next ends. If the whole record continued exactly like this it would be fabulous, but the thing is, it gets even better. Nobody Knows lets you feel where the collection is going – a thin smattering of barely discernible vocals colour an extra layer of sunshine that sits over the top of the beautiful mess.

It builds nicely into the collection's first 'proper' song, Home On The Wave, an exercise in painting a pop song using all the aforementioned, almost incidental instrumentation. The vocals are still buried, but a driving drum track and clearly defined chord progressions are definitive pointers to the song hidden within. You Don't Need Muscles To Get Love is a little more obvious again, with the ambient overtones played down to create some background texture rather than to completely distract you. At other points, the distance between an aural massage and pop songs is much shorter, Coasting and Sex In The Cinema examples of where the two ideas meet perfectly somewhere in the middle.

The album's closer, Euphoria, is a 20-minute space jam of keyboards and synths, and the only major sonic deviation overall. It's a piece unto itself, and gives the album something different to remember it by. Although mostly indiscernible, the lyrics are included in the artwork and are bleak and borderline suicidal. A perfect contrast to the ecstasy of the sounds that shroud them.