Album Review: Alpine - A Is For Alpine

Alpine know how to stick to a theme when it's working. From their first EP Zurich (and early band name Swiss) they've referenced wintery European ideas and sounds, creating a coolly-detached image that blogs and radio have eaten up, and A Is For Alpine is no radical departure.

The first two tracks, Lovers and Lovers 2, lead the listener down a rabbit hole of icily pretty, stripped-back pop music. Next up is the weightier Hands, which builds and drops with layered vocals and synth melding effortlessly with empty space. The middle of the album however suffers from a lack of ideas as well as hooks. It feels like every guitar line and drumbeat is on its tiptoes, trying to match singers Lou James and Phoebe Baker's ethereal, indistinct vocals, which robs the tracks like Softsides and Seeing Red of most of their bite. Singles Gasoline and Too Safe manage to rise out of the haze of chilled out atmospherics and breathy vocals: the former with an insistent beat and vocal that's immediate and catchy, and the latter with sharp, repetitive guitar. Into The Wild gives hints at something a little different, using more forceful rhythms to inject some welcome fun into their sound. This lighter, more energetic tone continues on The Vigour, completely with frantic handclaps, before Multiplication carries the album out on some more gentle, frost covered electro-pop. 

A Is For Alpine is an assured and polished debut, but it feels like the band is a little too comfortable in this sound, and that a little more experimentation might lift the whole album to the level of their killer singles.