Peter Wolf Crier – Garden of Arms

Peter Wolf Crier’s rustic debut drew comparisons to For Emma, Forever Ago, partly for some slight aesthetic similarities, and partly because the back-story (“born on a single summer night” by an inspired Peter Pisano) struck the same romantic nerve as the whole cabin-in-the-woods thing. To parallelise further, Garden of Arms, like, Bon Iver, carves new crannies in which to play with expectations, with the Minneapolis duo confidently dressing folk-pop bones in added finery.

Right Away is enlivened by errant percussion; Krishnamutri features an Eastern influence (but thankfully wears it lightly); the ornamental rhythms underpinning Hard Heart recall pre-mash-up era Soulwax; while back-tracking tapes on both opener Right Away and the closing Wheel suggest someone’s been giving their Radiohead albums a re-spin. Yet they’re not above a bit of undiluted sentiment: Never Meant to Love You, for instance, is nicely old-fashioned; straightforwardly staged, and all the better for it. [Chris Buckle]