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There is something utterly wonderful and incredibly cheeky about a band returning sixteen years after their last album with a new one that not only sounds as if they've never been away but even wraps itself in packaging that could have drifted through a timewarp opened approximately a month after they made the last one.
For those of you who don't remember Shelleyan Orphan, they wafted onto the music scene in the mid-eighties, mixing post-Goth with classically influenced lugubrious melodies that weren't a million aural miles away from All About Eve or The Hope Blister. They weren't on 4AD but they might as well have been.
It was however Rough Trade that gave them a home and put out their first three albums: 1987's Helleborine, 1989's Century Flower and 1992's Humroot, all of which were repackaged and reissued a year or two back, presumably paving the way for this new material. Any new fans they picked up at that time will be neither surprised nor disappointed by We Have Everything We Need.
Deep chamber strings and hypnotic woodwinds from the Budapest National Radio String Orchestra provide the perfect backing to mesmerising vocals shared between the equally talented Caroline Crawley and Jem Tayle. Ethereal may be a word that's overused when describing music such as this but there's no better one for harmonies raised to soundtrack a midnight wander through Grimm's fairytale woodlands.
Extra special moments to pull out from what is, essentially a nostalgia trip return to grace, are the hurdy-gurdy folksiness of Something Pulled Me and the truly haunting Host, which gives Crawley the chance to showcase the full range of her breathless vocal style over gentle harp-like strings. Another is the equally beautiful I May Never.
Like many of their contemporaries, Shelleyan Orphan mixed Celtic influences with classical chamber music rooted in a mythical age of Romance. They conjure up images of medieval gardens, castles emerging through the mist and chiffon dresses gently swaying in the wind. Bearnheart is the last Viennese waltz before the clock strikes midnight and we all sink back into the shadows. Their music still fills the room and though it may be more than 20 years since she first arrived on the scene, Crawley sounds as fragile, innocent and delicate as ever.
Shelleyan Orphan don't sound old-fashioned, however, nor stuck in a forgotten time. Touches such as the Victorian fairground accordions of I'm Glad You Didn't Jump Out Of The Car That Day bring the music if not exactly up to date, then at least into line with a burlesque relevance that winks at you from behind a velvet curtain.
Bosom rocks out in a way that only ethereal post-Goth channelling the spirit of My Bloody Valentine can, before on final track Everything We Need they return to the fairy dance of plucked strings, slinking away to the enchanted garden from which they came. Let's just hope it's less than sixteen years until they emerge again.
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