The Cellophane Flowers

Staring at the World

Somehow this album creeps up on you until you suddenly realise that you have been listening, intently, for nearly forty minutes. I think I have fallen in love with Francesca’s voice and the rest of the band create a sound that backs her up perfectly. It ain’t perfect but by heck it is good.

Stylistically it is Indie but they create a darker and more insistent noise than most of their contemporaries. The guitars have a chiming quality and the percussion is brilliantly kept down in the mix to ensure that it has all the room to drive the music along.

When they want to get ‘poppy’ as they do on ‘Pendulum Eyes’ they still keep an otherworldly folksiness to the music but on numbers like the opener ‘Voices’ they send chills up and down your neck. Francesca’s voice is like Nico without the death – more musical but with the same accented delivery. The closer, ‘In A Hole’, is cold and fragile but with real emotion as well.

They create different pictures on all of these little gems, 10 glistening teardrops of music, beautifully played and making a really remarkable debut. If this isn’t one of the successes of the season I will want to know why!