The London band Sorry make music that is slinky and in debt to the textures of dance music without being entirely dance-able. The group's newest album, 925, drops on Domino tomorrow and the release is a bright spot in a grim week. If the tunes here are not exactly sunny, at least they are original enough that they will likely bring a smile to your face.
"Starstruck" has an odd, loping rhythmic hook, while "Snakes" oozes its way into your ears with its Portishead-like vocal approach, and washes of keyboards. The offering is affecting and haunting, as is the mildly cathartic "As The Sun Sets" later on the album. I suppose a critic could grasp at some odd comparison-points in writing about this band, but what's here really is so distinctive in stylistic terms that any lazy reference by me, for example, would be simply me being lazy. Indeed, "Right Round the Clock" is the most conventional thing here and even it sounds like something Garbage would have rejected for being too moody. Elsewhere, "More" is a skewed anthem, while "Ode to Boy" is genuinely beautiful.
The stuff on 925 undulates like the best kind of ambient music even if the players remain far too engaged to use that label to describe any of this. Similarly, there's the slightest flash of a mood here that pins this next to post-punk stuff from decades ago, yet the contemporary spirit of the whole enterprise renders this wholly unlike the music of most past points of comparison. 925 has a weirdly hypnotic quality about it, and while I didn't quite know where things were going, I enjoyed the journey and loved the record.
925 is out tomorrow via Domino.
More details on Sorry via the band's official Facebook page, or their official website.
[Photo: Sam Hiscox]