PAUL Thomas Saunders is a young artist who thinks big.
His sound is sweeping, windswept and elemental, with spacey song titles to match, such as Starless State of The Moonless Barrow or Santa Meurte’s Lightning & Flare.
Don’t let any of this put you off, though, but instead surrender to the panoramic musical delights on this aural equivalent to widescreen cinema.
The noise he produces is beautiful and huge, floaty and ethereal, an echo of the 1980s big sound era, yet 24-year-old Saunders mints something fresh from these ingredients, not least thanks to his pure, soaring falsetto, which adds a quivering human scale to the musical vastness.
There is plenty of rain and darkness here, alongside a poetic soulfulness.
These songs are like vast paintings in music, and the only weakness, perhaps, is that the anthems blend into each other, each song a little too similar to the last. But that’s a small complaint about a big and mostly wonderful album.
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