Lo-fi arty dream pop with a sultry voiced singer who sounds more jazz or blues than either of the aforementioned tags. The singer’s voice is what elevates this to being an adequate release because the minimal production is not without ideas but is quite thin. The songs tend to revolve around the aesthetic of 80’s indie bands with hints of shoegaze, but the vocal never quite lets it settle in that territory, and whilst the formula works to some extent, it doesn’t smash you in the face with its raw power or experimental panache or melodic genius, it incorporates a little of everything but excels at nothing. As an example the title track “Keep You Safe”, with its heavily distorted keyboard as the main riff, veers between being pretty nice and amateurishly unlistenable over the course of the song and its difficult to say which camp it actually ends up in. I guess the problems I’m trying to pinpoint are at their most obvious in the final song “Stay Down”, which has a nice vocal but just sounds too much like a bedroom demo and relies on a slightly hackneyed acoustic guitar riff.
With more polish this could be an interesting project but at present it’s too thin and lacks a strong identity and sounds too much like the sort of thing you could download a million times from a million different places.
Kim Monaghan
