Crescent

Releasing a mere five records in the past dozen years, Bristol’s Crescent are hardly the most prolific band, but when they do get around to making an album it’s usually something very special, and that’s the case with Little Wave. The fact that Crescent features former members of Flying Saucer Attack and, specifically, Movietone shouldn’t come as a shock because they share a similar low-key, low-fi mentality, although the fragility that Little Wave displays is very much a Crescent attribute. This is definitely the band’s quietest recording, with the album having an unpolished feel that implies there wasn’t much done in the studio, almost like a field recording. The band take it a step further, recording two of the songs outdoors at locations around Bristol, although it doesn’t appear to have had much of an effect on the finished product. Bringing together the pastoral English folk of Nick Drake with the minimal experiments of Bark Psychosis, Crescent continue to discover new veins of wonderful music to mine during their ongoing evolution.