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Breaks Co-op - The Sound Inside (Parlophone)
UK release date: 27 March 2006
3 stars
Breaks Co-op - The Sound Inside

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track listing

1. Sound Inside
2. Wonder
3. Otherside
4. Settle Down
5. Last Night
6. Place For You
7. Duet
8. Question Of Freedom
9. LMA
10. Beats Interlude
11. Too Easily
12. Lay Me Down
13. Twilight

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This New Zealand trio are clearly happy to do things at their own speed, an approach that can be applied to their music as well as their ability to finish a record. And so it is that The Sound Inside follows up their debut album, the electronica opus Roofers, by some eight years.

Granted, in that time the band have been busy with other things, not least Zane Lowe, known much more for his media exploits as a Radio 1 DJ than his work the other side of the studio doors. You might assume that given his drive and enthusiasm for presenting that Lowe would be part of a hyperactively charged musical approach, but here he's happy to join band mate Hamish Clark and more recent recruit, singer Andy Lovegrove, in making some blissed-out music.

While Roofers dealt primarily with electronica The Sound Inside goes for a more earthy, acoustic sound, with emotionally concentrated vocals to boot. It's easy-going for sure, but that doesn't render it lightweight. Indeed the shafts of light the contentedly upbeat vocals bring seem occasionally to be masking something a little darker, a feeling hinted at in the lyrics of Settle Down, which murmurs "seems the more you suffer too, the more I settle down", over a warm fretless bass sound.

Elsewhere Lowe's carefree, 'love life' attitude shines through and is shared by the band. The Otherside searches with Lovegrove's falsetto verse and finds an anthemic, gospel-tinged chorus. Last Night taps into a Massive Attack vibe, a torch song whose verse melody strongly resembles REM's Everybody Hurts. Meanwhile the tender A Place For You invites the subject to "just come down next to me".

Just as the record seems about to go on too long it reigns in with a couple of twilight moments, the penultimate track even bringing a sense of impending occasion with its "the time has come" lyrics. Not a heavyweight close, but once again a bit of depth brought to what might in other hands be a throwaway collection of tracks.

So a song-based indulgence, then, that draws lightly on soul, blues and lo-fi folk, not to mention the hip hop Lowe and Clark know and love. Recruiting Lovegrove seems to have been something of a masterstroke for them though, and with him in the mix the trio's vocal collages bring something of the desert heat suggested by the cover, and make for a highly evocative record.


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