From Over The Water - 'Seekers Of The Shrine'

 I'm not using names here, as the album comes out under the name From Over The Water despite basically being the project of one individual artist.

And, full disclosure here, I know that individual artist, he's a mate. He's one of those faces you see at all the right gigs around town, one of those people you get to know because you know you like exactly the same stuff. That he's on a label run by another mate is a happy coincidence, Liverpool's a village, everybody knows this. That he started his gigging days in a band with a lad I worked with twenty years ago is just one of those things that happen.

From Over The Water's 'Seekers Of The Shrine' is an album that's been coming for a while, a piece of work that you knew was in the background, a piece of work that you really want to like because you like the bloke behind it, a piece of work that you really hope won't disappoint. Not after the wait, not after the liking of all concerned.

And it doesn't. 'Seekers...' is a delight.

It has sounds that I expect to like; the influence of the bands from eighties/nineties Liverpool that I know both he and I — and hopefully you — love, the bands from the sixties that influenced those eighties/nineties bands. And on top of those influences places some lovely melodies and inventive arranging.

The two biggest influences here? And I'm just speaking for what I'm hearing, what I know of the writer's tastes, and everything's filtered, everything's personal: the work of Michael Head, the catalogue of Love. The songs here have that kindred feeling of being able to take a left turn at any second but make that left turn be the only direction that would ever make sense, choruses that sound inevitable, guitars that decorate perfectly, hooks all over the place.

In case you're wondering, all of the above is praise, every word signals grace and accomplishment.

From Hello Panno's breathless joyful pop rush to El Segundo's decision to start on jangle, resolve as a guitar wig out and then throw the trumpets on top of everything else just to make sure. The wig out, the trumpets, come back for the epic title track but not before you've passed through 'The Whispering Trees' with its acoustic folk guitar, piano, flute and strings. 

Noir and Take A Leaf channel Pavement's angular guitars in the service of pop, with the latter handing its melodicism to a thoroughly unadorned, right in your ear vocal. And either this vaccination has handed my hearing over to Bill Gates or Downtown is hiding bells just below its surface.

It's basically one of those where I get to tell you that if you like the same things that I like then you're going to like this: it's an album that will feel familiar despite being brand new, may feel like acts you know but be entirely itself, taking feelings you might find familiar but putting them into new shapes; one of those fine fine records that will slot straight into your collection, file into your library, ready for revisiting. 

The litmus test? I got to the end, started it again. Because I wanted it again immediately. And that kick into Hello Panno sounded even more joyous than it did forty minutes earlier.