dna Walthorpe has stopped writing obscene letters to the Daily Mail on behalf of Joe Orton and the spirit of the Smiths has left Morrissey's LA tanned corpse and rested back home in East Anglia, all of these things you can tell by the cover of the Foxgloves, and a few things besides-for example, Roland Barthes should have been a sensitive boy pin up, and dusty rose works equally well on compact disc covers and your grandmothers curtains. From the cover alone, you know that the only way that this album could have been produced is with a healthy history of poetry and academia.


And while all this seems to reach a level of bedsit pretension unmatched since Belle and Sebastian came whimpering out of Glasgow, in the twenty minutes it takes to get through four songs what we have is a rare beauty, something new in the well ploughed Britpop ground.


I heard this first in the back of a car, driving through downtown side streets, watching neon blur in the warm rain, the urban melancholy it invokes. The songs about beaten down boys and waiting at bus stops were the perfect sound track for a mope, and instead of sing-a-long choruses or drag-you-along hooks we got instrumental breaks, with an almost acoustic bass, some minor keyboards, and finally on the last track drums.


With four people in the car, listening to all of the nuances became almost impossible, but when i listened to it again at home things became more clear. The music is so austere so that it can match Stevie Troussay's vocals--which have a shyness to them, and a deep need to speak. These two desires work in oppostion, and that oppostion gives birth to a definite richness. the way he whispers the lyrics suggest an intimacy that is deeply familar, almost derritave but only in a way that would make us want to protect them from unfair barbs.


Some of that protection comes from the familiarity that one feels about bands close to ones heart, and some of that protection comes from the music itself. There are places here where the influences come too close to surface, and places where everything is exceedingly soft-but in the bright light of day, the comfort is still there, and a pretty grace that escapes being twee. Even its shortness is a panacea to the bloated state of others, and for that reason among others it has been what I have been waiting for all year, namely an album to mope to, until the moping stops and you can sing along.