Two blokes with synthesizers, making moody music atop a sea of sequenced percussion – sound familiar? Pet Shop Boys? Erasure? OMD? Swimmer One had, in a sense, backed themselves into a pigeonhole before they played a note.
Despite that, with Andrew Eaton’s languid vocal delivery and Hamish Brown cast as the boffin at the back, they fairly burst onto the scene, what, over five years ago, with a Radio One record of the Week in ‘We Just Make Music For Ourselves’. Then, they rather vanished from the scene, making sporadic appearances, including a debut album which rather snuck out, despite the presence on it of the sinister, epic ‘Largs Hum’.
Back into suspended animation they went, like any good sci-fi act, and the duo have finally resurfaced.
And, like Doctor Who, taken on a different appearance. There’s a third member now for starters, Laura Cameron Lewis, who doubles up the ‘human’ quotient (‘replacing’, in a sense, occasional vocalist Cora Bissett, who presumably found River City more of a regular gig).
The band have always delivered the unexpected – ‘Psychogeography’ is, in essence, good old-fashioned electro, but with a shimmering sheen over it – almost like the unsung greats of old-skool synthpop (e.g. Thomas Leer, Robert Rental) had got boned up on the newest production techniques and a bunch of modern synths and produced something like the classics they did way back when. ‘Ghosts in The Hotel’ has guitars on it – ok, Hamish has always used guitars, but perhaps not to such effect, and with it the band step way back, back, alighting circa early Roxy Music.
Even the more understated songs have something going for them – take ‘You Have Fallen Short of Our Expectations’ – what they call a grower, it could be the less-beat-heavy tune that’s wheeled out mid-set, and not just worthy of its place on this album for the title alone. ‘Here’s Your Train, Safe Home’ (they like their titles, they do) is one for a rainy night in the Scottish countryside, a show-stopper reminiscent of the Blue Nile at their best, but ‘This Club Is For Everyone, Even You’ perhaps sums up, well, everything in the band – a pulsating piece of, yes, electropop, with Eaton’s croon fitting in with his new bandmate’s harmonies in a perfect dovetail.
For anyone looking for a band to carry the mantle of the bands mentioned in the first line of this review, look no further.
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