Cherry Ghost – Beneath This Burning Shoreline

As with his Ivor Novello award winning debut Thirst for Romance, Simon Aldred here continues his efforts to chronicle the misfortune of life’s losers. Juxtaposing unpleasant subject matter against beautiful orchestration has always been Cherry Ghost’s stock-in-trade, indeed their name even suggests such sweetly sinister, rose-tinted hauntings, but the boys have outdone themselves with this release.

They hit the ground running with We Sleep On Stones, drums and piano keeping momentum as strings coil righteously around the tale of murderous revenge. The sepia-toned narrative incline, the characters that evoke both pity and wonder, the epic arrangements – all of this combines to form a truly cinematic experience, particularly with a nod to the spaghetti western scores of Luis Bacalov and Ennio Morricone halfway through the Tindersticks-esque The Night They Buried Sadie Clay. First single Kissing Strangers, however, sounds closer to Elbow than Eastwood, but there are no complaints here.