Metronomy – Love Letters

Where The English Riviera was a love letter to British seasides, Love Letters is, well, you can guess. The titular track, with a female chorus cooing ‘lo-oove letters’ like The Supremes, has Joe Mount – the hopeless romantic – admitting defeat: ‘You’ve got me writing love letters.’

His penchant for wonky, dated sounds holds true; if the movie Drive was on the Sega Saturn it’d sound like Boy Racers; Monstrous has that jangly toybox harpsichord, and Reservoir hums with the same bittersweet boardwalk vibe heard in TER’s The Look. But is the novelty thinning? Love Letters will be a Marmite album for many. There’s always an eccentricity to Mount’s compositions; not enough to alienate, but you have to really dig that falsetto (and those catchy/infruriating shoop-doop-doop-ahs on I’m Aquarius) to properly get into Metronomy. A heartfelt package this may be, but it lags behind their last two LPs by a Devonshire mile. [George Sully]