Islet Soft Fascination LP (Clear Vinyl)

The genre-defying Welsh group define their vision with a breath-taking 2023 album, Islet's 'Soft Fascination' is an ecstatic experience in music, an explosion of emotion subsumed in sound. The album is filled with high energy cadence and meditations on collective joy, a balancing act underpinned with glorious melodies and Emma Daman Thomas' evocative vocals that swirl in the symphonic surf. Self-produced, and with instruments recorded live with few overdubs, the effect is direct, it veers from the upfront and immediate to the spacious and challenging.

The first half is intentionally fast, intense, almost relentless. The second half is more spacious, as the album unravels and becomes more hazy. There is excitement and fascination and a willingness to show a lack of restraint in realising it, traversing hailstorms, hedgerows, broken promises and poisoned prayers; constantly breathing real life all in. Featuring standout singles: the pulsating 'Euphoria', the liberating flow of energy on 'River Body' and the recurring conundrum of choice of 'Hat Person', 'Soft Fascination' is an album of rare beauty.

On their latest album, Welsh psych-pop quartet Islet aimed to get listeners as close to the experience of being in the room with the band. They recorded the bulk of the music live in the studio with minimal overdubs and a touch of post-production effects to add the half-awake haze that makes their songs so, so good. I don't know that it was quite so successful at trying to capture the raw experience of, say, seeing the band live, but there's little doubt that the band playing together in the same space rather than piecing things together in a studio definitely had an effect on the music. On the spirited first side of the LP especially, Islet sound fully engaged and energized, lifted up by John Thomas' subtly propulsive drumming and main vocalist Emma Daman Thomas' nicely dubby bass work. On the second side, the band get further out into space, adding a feeling of weightlessness to tracks like 'An Open Door' and, appropriately enough, 'Sleepwalker in a Fog,' while managing to keeping everything tethered to a sturdy foundation.