A panda in a wood playing a trumpet. Not a hugely conclusive lead-in to the album, but neither is it misleading. The same, bright starry nature-loving, creature loving cuddliness and surrealism that earmarks the Michel Gondrey directed videos to Bjork’s Bachelorette, Hyperballad and Human Nature is a spirit that’s continued here. Grand orchestral sweepscapes, weeping strings, giddy and ever so slightly discordant sequencer noises, brooding ambient passages and the rasping vocal purr of Angela McCluskey – like Bjork – but without the needless yelps – and like Nina Simone, even down the gratuitous big band flourishes on ‘Love’s Almighty’.
Feel like you’ve been somewhere like this before? Well you have. The band’s last album, ‘Genetic World’ plotted a very similar course and though fans are likely to be grateful that ‘Angel Milk’ enjoys a similar voyage of discovery, more critical minds might find themselves disappointed that the band have failed to force the boundaries still further. The gentle incandescence of tracks like ‘Brighton Beach’ and ‘Close’ fail to offend, but by that same token they fail to seduce you either. The success of tracks like ‘Breathe’ was assured by a perfectly balanced formula of mood and melody – and whilst much on this album has mood, the dissolute grandeur of the whole undertaking seems to have stripped it of the tunes. Like a picture without a foreground, a film without a cast the album coasts along in a perfectly agreeable fashion without really involving the listener at all. You’re impressed by all the effects, the attention to detail and the vivid flourishes of the strokes but you fail to be moved.
If you ask me, the album fails to really monopolise on the tremendous introduction provided by trumpet playing Panda. But what could ever follow that?