Whether it’s because it recalls the lush and feathery melancholics of Harriet Wheeler and the Sundays (as on ‘Your Shoes’) or the erotic lower labyrinths of PJ Harvey (as on ‘Body Sighs’) the new and gloriously belated album from Dorset sweethearts, Shelleyan Orphan, ‘We Have Everything We Needs’ evokes those far-off bookish days of 4AD and This Mortal Coil in a way that not even a Lisa Gerrard-Elizabeth Fraser takeaway could deliver. New age, ambient wave, ethereal wave, third-wave – it doesn’t really matter, as it’s patently clear that this crazy, amorphous duo have stolen the wings of a thousand fairies and the sighs of a thousand and one Arabian nights to bring you a dozen or so songs of such gorgeous, vintage romance that it could quite easily pass for the backdrop to a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – such is the frisky, magic charm of songs like ‘Beamheart’ and ‘Evolute’. Whether its pretentious or not, really depends on whether or not you consider such clearly absorbing music a pretence, or whether or not you begrudge them their 17-year hiatus.
Meditations, Cathedral bells and prayer, intellectual conversation – it’s all in there, bristling away with the earnestness and intensity of a midnight conversation at some deeply mysterious Gothic mansion or other, and accompanied by the blithe and not so blithe spirits of the band’s characteristic woodwind and stringed instruments: from Cor Anglais, to Oboe, from Bassoon to the Celeste and the Hurdy Gurdy – instruments I can barely spell, let alone play. And dig those lovely John Barry suspense motifs on the album opener too – piano trills, high strings, horns, blaring trumpets, and that classic underlying snare drum – just marvellous.
Recorded at Riverside Studios in Bath (with the string and woodwind arrangements added in Budapest by the Hungarian National Radio) the album captures the shamelessly wordy whimsicality of XTC’s ‘Apple Venus’ collection and the tearful simplicity of pressed flowers.
It really is true: treasure still remains in hidden places.