King Creosote, Meursault & Animal Magic Tricks – Cold Seeds

This album, recorded over two weekends in the Song, by Toad living room, manages to capture the uncanny joy of accidentally tuning into a wonderful but inevitably lost again radio broadcast at 3am, partly through stylistic decision and partly through its messily revolving line-up. Leave Me To Lie Alone In The Ground and King are real spectral pleasures, making a strong case for this distant aesthetic, though a reprisal of Sleet from Meursault's recent sophomore offering is a little redundant, wilfully inserting a frustrating wedge of static which hampers a plaintive performance.

A cover of King Creosote's By Eleven O'Clock She'd Left led by Animal Magic Tricks, on the other hand, is a lonely gondola ride that adds another dimension to the song, renovating the chorus with a call-and-response which brings an element of tragic humour to the proceedings. It’s all a little opaque at times, yet Cold Seeds is still an absorbing curio. [Oisin Kealy]