December of 2008 brought us Dear City‘s first EP, a seasonably chilly little collection of five ghostly gems, to end the Oxfordbands.com year on a high point. Their follow-up, broadly speaking, is just as evocative, inventive and delicate, although one or two of the songs seem this time round to be a little mechanical.
‘Stranger Guest’ begins inauspiciously, with a conventional minor-key acoustic guitar pick and some uncertain singing from vocalist Camille Baziadoly, but producer Phill Honey soon works his magic, threading percussive electronic glitches and winking, spectral keyboards through the texture, before uncoiling a menacing tom figure over Camille’s ever-more maddening schoolyard chant.
After this strong start, we have something close to a misfire. ‘Among Three’ may be Dear City’s weakest song to date, a repetitive triple-time two-chord guitar vamp which admittedly benefits from the horns, pads and beats Honey throws protectively around it. Baziadoly’s singing is intense and focussed, but the tune as a whole is not brilliantly memorable.
Quality is restored on the compelling stomp ‘Sideways’, which combines hushed, intensely sweet Cocteau-esque close-harmony with romantic sweeping strings. In Honey’s original but non-alienating production work, we’re not too far from Radiohead’s superb ‘In Rainbows’.
And that also goes for the lush, expansive ‘Deep Crawl’, a lovely, otherworldly daydream shrouded in chorussed guitars and strange, echoing sounds that could be a voice or a keyboard or some instrument yet to be patented. In all then, although this record lacks the ‘shock of the new’ factor of their debut, and there is the odd misstep along the way, Dear City remains a novel, fascinating act, capable of many moments of transcendent beauty.