Cyanotype not only sounds like the best bits of alternative rock from the last three decades, but as if we were hearing them for the first time. And that is because there is nothing dated or nostalgic found here; in fact, quite the opposite is true. This sounds like the future rising to greet us. And the future sounds great.
Agnes Uncaged also gives us an album which is, for want of a better word, un-second-guess-able, where even after listening to one track, even that doesn’t give you much of an insight as to what might come next. Take the opening brace of songs: “Paperdoll” steadily grows into a squalling, raw-edged, dense, and guitar-drenched shoegazy soundscape, conjuring a mental note to play your old My Bloody Valentine albums, but that in no way prepares you for the sharp, spacious and visceral guitar lines that “Capricorn” is built on.
And so it goes. “Picture Driver” runs between ambient alt-alt-alt-pop balladry and intense swathes of swirling indie, the whole thing shot through with ethereal vocals, anticipations, and crescendoes. “Garbage Truck” is the closest Agnes Uncaged comes to the straight down the line, foot-on-the-monitor, rock and roller, but even then, they do so with more finesse and feeling than the genre usually affords. And “Sinkhole” is that long-lost ’80s college rock band who should have been the biggest band of the decade but who somehow got lost in the sonic flood.
The fantastic thing about Cyanotype is that it flits through a lot of sounds that you half remember….only now they somehow sound better. It is an album that echoes the past whilst it flies into the future (and flies in the face of fashion too, which is always cool). I know it’s a bit premature to think of such things, but if I were the sort of person who could be bothered to do those end-of-year album lists, even this early in the year, I would predict that this would be pretty high up in the ranking.
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