Coves - Soft Friday (2014)

Basements hung with fairy lights, 60s tape reels spinning antique spools, drums dusted with white powder. Gritty riffs and psych rock washes slither beneath airy, blissed-blank Nico vocals spinning spectral tales of shattered romance. A beautifully ruined pair – he a leather-clad glowering guitar phantom, she a glacial, broken bombshell – blow glitter at each other through the flashes from old cameras. This is the world of Coves, a classic psych-garage aesthetic vacuum-sealed forever in one time, one space. The space is Castle Grayskull, the live-in studio that musical mastermind John Ridgard helped build in a disused office in Leamington Spa and where their debut album was recorded. And the time covers the duration of singer and lyricist Beck Wood's last big relationship, laid out in her songs from first flutter to final choke. The 10-track album is just 40 minutes long and includes ‘Honeybee’, which was the first song they wrote together and arguably their most vicious, Beck sweetly snarling “you’re burning through my memory like a poison” over John’s demonic gutter bass, the sitar’n’synth psych-pop wonder ‘No Ladder’ and the propulsive garage beauty ‘Cast A Shadow’ (“that's about when I got back with him and all the frustration in the relationship”) which will be the band’s next single, due for release on 27th January.