Trapped Mice
Album: Winter Sun
Label: Armellodie
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.facebook.com/trappedmice

Trapped Mice is an Edinburgh-based five-piece that builds an exotic and sensual soundscape around the heartfelt songwriting and exposed, passionately soul-baring (if at times quite eccentric) singing of frontman Ian Tilling. The end result is very striking, and highly individual, musically a kind of blend of High Tide, early Family, Echo & the Bunnymen, Admiral Fallow and Trembling Bells, with its intelligent and crucial layering of at times wilfully distorted tones of violin, crashing electric guitars, organ, accordion, synths, bass and drums, together producing an often disorientating, sometimes blinding lo-fi psych charge that on occasions both soars and tramples across your consciousness.

Ian's band-mates Lucie Miller, David Friend, Brian Pokora and Barry Jackson prove themselves closely in tune with Ian's musical and lyrical vision, and the result is both intensely invigorating and stimulatingly close-knit, with Lucie's mournful violin figuring large in the band's musical signature. The onward progress of the album is also quite interesting, for after an arrestingly moody (though undeniably strange) effects-laden prelude (curiously, titled An Ending), it gets under way with the this-means-business, seriously angsty power-chordings of Cancel Shift, then for contrast the pace slows for the vulnerable Dance While Winter Cries. With the enchanting Mona Lisa forming a kind of emotional bridge to Hermit Point (a grandly atmospheric narrative inspired by the defiance of a man who refused to sell his house to make way for a coastal leisure development). After which point, and notwithstanding occasional injections of dry humour between the lines, the sense of dread intensifies with the sinister desperation of the sordidly-waltzing Quiet Place, following the shattering central episode of which the disc's hitherto-predominant melancholy lyricism then gradually makes way for a sequence of brooding journey-epics, culminating in the rather menacing The Devil Wandered In. Between these poles we encounter the album's more experimental moments, taking us from the Tambourine-Man-rhythmed Night Of Broken Glass straight into the weird spoken-word onslaught Cameraman, the latter's pounding percussion beat continuing on into the ominous post-nuclear ambience and Joy-Division riffing of Arthur's Seat.

Maybe on reflection the album's title Winter Sun isn't so far off the mark, when the intimate and the global perspectives collide, and collapse in on themselves, for the final track Demons, where the world's population seems to've been reduced to just Ian and his acoustic guitar left voicing his pained lament. I get the feeling that I shall be playing this album rather often in the coming months; it brings its almost deafeningly forefront vocal and instrumental presence to realise Ian's formidable writing, and above all possesses a quite unmistakable, and in the end very powerful and truly distinctive, character.

David Kidman