Album Review: Still Corners - Strange Pleasures

Strange Pleasures, the sophomore effort from Londoner Greg Hughes' musical outlet Still Corners, starts off with the dreamy The Trip, six-and-a-half minutes of pensive sanguinity. That such a juxtaposition plays well together, coalescing with a underwater guitar line that shimmers like one of Matt Mondaline's textbook Ducktails manoeuvres, and with vocalist Tessa Murray drifting huskily through the mix as the enigmatic siren luring the listener closer to a guarded epiphany, is a masterstroke in itself. But that Strange Pleasures maintains this atmosphere for three-quarters of an hour is truly inspiring – a sonorous mantra for the ages.

Beginning To Blue slips into slightly deeper, darker waters, before the undulation of I Can't Sleep ironically cradles its sound, a lysergic lullaby. Berlin Lovers burns with a skittish intensity, like a burn in the film; the subtleties of Future Age is underpinned by curious percussive repetition and the kaleidoscopic sound bites that flitter in and out of the mix; the retrograde theatrics of Fireflies also energises, but feels just as much like a repressed memory, a glimpse of an image captured in amber from a bygone era. The percolating building in the closing title track is effortless, Murray's voice slowly rising in icy intensity yet refusing to launch into unadulterated flight. It is all languid yet calculated, neatly calibrated.

Normally saturation of a particular sound across the course of an album wears out its welcome in short course. Yet the languid dreamscapes that are evoked throughout Strange Pleasures are indeed that – a strange pleasure. This is a world that is foreign yet seductive, hallucinogenic and intoxicating.