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Smile Down Upon Us, quite apart from their lovely name, are a unique proposition in the fact they've never met.
It all goes to show just what's possible in a modern age of recording, where the musical lynchpins Keiron Phelan and David Sheppard come up with the initial ideas in a London studio and mail the results over to Tokyo. There moomLooo, a singer Phelan came across on the internet, germinates the ideas into fully fledged songs with the help of an extraordinary, Bjork-like voice, perfectly complimenting the exotic colours and hypnotic, percussive rhythms going on underneath.
The trio plan to meet this summer - and having already demonstrated musical chemistry before even getting into the same room, the signs are good should they decide to perform live together.
In all truth it's the colours that lift their sound well above the ordinary, providing a frequently changing backdrop with a warm glow. This will be familiar to those in the know of Phelan and Sheppard's past venture, the wonderful State River Widening. And with Sheppard's musical knowledge - his recent biography of Brian Eno has just been released - it's clear these two know a thing about production.
moomLooo's lyrics also owe a bit to Bjork, being enjoyably off the wall but without trying too hard to do so. The intro to Kotoba No Yokue (‘the words are lost') finds her talking of the "magical creature with the enormous mouth", that "began to talk...with magical words". This takes place with just birdsong for company, and is soon joined by a hypnotic guitar thrumming.
Such is the personality of the record, which charms at almost every turn. moomLooo's voice is completely delectable, and works even better when accompanied in low tones by Phelan and Sheppard on the Tunng-like Ken Ken Pah. The constantly referring refrain of "hop skip and jump" accompanies the song's emotive story, two languages united in one song.
The rich textures include French horn, violin and ukulele, not all at once obviously but used in a way to add extra colour to those hypnotic guitars. Occasionally more could be made of the bass end however, as on Two Weeks Last Summer a good, winding line can't be heard as well.
A small quibble, though - this is a fine, enlightening record, one of those albums you can put on for a blissful escape into an exotic sound world, but not one so rich that you couldn't go back and indulge again.
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