Gravenhurst – The Ghost In Daylight (2012)

Bristol songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nick Talbot’s fourth album for Warp is a gorgeously hallucinatory affair, marking a slight shift towards late-80s/early-90s psychedelia. The Ghost … occasionally conjures up the Stone Roses’s gentler moments, the hymnal sections of Spacemen 3′s Playing With Fire and the Church’s hazy masterpiece, Priest = Aura. And yet, for all the melancholy beauty, there’s an atmosphere of quiet disturbance which makes it chime eerily with our times. The sense of creeping unease is typified by The Foundry, which begins with a plangent electronic intro like something off the Eno-led Roxy Music debut, but veers into an essay on the everyday origins of evil, crystallized in the malevolent main character. These are terrific, understated songs with a church-like serenity, but hooks that reel you in, too: the endlessly repeated guitar motif on Circadian; the way the sublime The Prize gathers momentum towards a frazzled climax. It adds up to a beautifully haunting set, and the sense that Talbot is surely among music’s best-kept secrets.