Musée Méchanique/ Hold This Ghost

Musée Méchanique
Hold This Ghost
(Soutterain Transmissions)

Musée Méchanique's story is a timeless one; boy meets boy, boys become friends and form a band, boys become obsessed with California's Mechanical Museum and decide to base their band around its ideas, boys create minor masterpiece. The end. But, whilst the band's story is hardly standard fare, their first long player is hardly a standard album.
Recorded in a small converted Victorian house alongside a Portland riverbank on an array of vintage instruments and curios, Musée Méchanique's début is as truly evocative an offering as its setting suggests; its wistful nostalgia compounded by sweetly mournful vocals and a feeling of endless space.
From the fairground opening of recent single, 'Like Home' and the Sufjan Stevens-esque twinkling frailty of 'The Propellers' to the frankly heartbreaking 'Under Glass', the band's sepia tinged folk is shot through with enough experimentation and layering to ensure it never sinks into the often dirge-like tendencies of the genre. It also retains a level of stark simplicity that proves that less is often most definitely more.
So, next time you find yourself walking through deserted fields in the breaking dawn, watching the sun set over a gently lapping beach, or in any number of ludicrously perfect, filmic situations, you'll have a sure-fire soundtrack to pass the time with you. Gorgeous.

Lisa Wright