Legal wrangling ended successfully as the publishers of 1950s standard, ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’ allowed the band not only to include a sizeable portion of the song’s lyric’s on the band’s debut album, ‘Palace’ but to clue it in as a long overdue single in 2011 – almost two full years after ‘Surfacing’ was first recorded by the band for East City Records. And the delay might prove to their advantage, the interim years having seen the band grow from a spotty faced Echo and Bunnymen tribute band to the great white British hopes of Universal imprint, Loog Records. And this is the story so far; a dense storm cloud of billowing industrial romance deliciously enmeshed in the tradition of 1980s indie and reverberating with all the religious intensity of a young Mohammed. It’s there in the deep, deliberate beats of the sweet yet tumultuous, ‘Surfacing’, the locomotive whir of ‘Five Trees’ and in the haunting iridescence of ‘The Shore’. No, not just platefuls of reverb, but the dreamy, gothic romance of My Bloody Valentine, The Cocteau Twins and (you’ll be pleased to know) The Smiths.
You know the kind of direction you wanted The Killer’s second album to take? Well this is it. Part Morrissey, part-Ian McCulloch, part Palace Fires, part-dreaming spires. Check out the gorgeous closing track, ‘Paper Thin’ by way of a taster.