Album Review - Will Halliday's Dusk

Impressionism never sounded so good - sunlight reflecting off the water, warm summer afternoons, an evanescent feeling of timelessness as sounds dart in and out, cheekily playing behind the shimmering melodies. She might be leaving - The Girl - but Halliday has wrapped this parting with such wistful dexterity it seems almost necessary, this parting, a logical bittersweet conclusion in a beautifully crafted pop confection.

The ethereality of it all continues through the rest of Dusk, evoking a kind of pre-Bowie psychedelic feel, as odd, unearthly sounds skitter from side to side and harmonies more angelic than any Beach Boys record wash over Halliday's gentle voice. This might be an album about a Man Who Lost His Smile, but these songs have so uplifting an ambience any listener will have a real problem preventing themselves quietly smiling inwardly. Or outwardly, broadly, as they experience it all. Quintessential jangly beautiful pop.

Think Strawberry Field Beatles, The Move, The Raspberries, Badfinger, the real hardcore classic '60s popsters, with sonic backdrops cut in the kind of experimental mould of Godley & Creme and post Under The Milky Way Church, appropriate in the sense that Dusk was recorded by Church drummer Tim Powles, a dab hand at adding that otherworldly touch to a record. For all that, this is no retro/nostalgia trip.

This is contemporary pop enriched by a deep sense of the best of what has come before, aware of its context but made fresh and new as the most cutting-edge trip-hop or drum'n'bass remix, and unique by a singer, songwriter and musician with the dexterity, sensitivity and ingenuity to lightly insinuate his personal stamp into every note of the music.

A broken heart has never sounded so alluring an experience as it does in the hands of Will Halliday and Dusk. As he sings, he literally sprinkles (his) candy under (your) eyelids - and ears - as he caresses your soul, just on the edge of consciousness, with his visions of love, loss and hope, like some impressionist painter. Light, splintering on the water's surface, as dusk draws near and, drowsy with warmth and spirit, love seems imminently possible once more. Stoned immaculate indeed - but Love, this time, is the drug.