Turin Brakes: The Optimist LP

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

And beware of Englishmen bearing acoustic guitars.

No actually, be aware that this debut album from the London duo of Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian is the best thing you are likely to hear in the low-voltage vein until someone relocates Britrock's volume knob.

Fitting somewhere between the trippy-rootsy swagger of Gomez, the folky balladeering of Travis, and most every other British indie band with a Jeff Buckley album under their arm, Turin Brakes cast a strange and gorgeous spell with these dozen tracks.

The songs are deceptively simple, introspective things, their semi-acoustic arrangements framing Knights' keening warble of a voice and a lyrical approach which leavens its melancholy with an askew, black wit.

It wisely saves its rockier urges to late in the piece, on the slow-loping Slack and Buckley-rock of Mind Over Money, but its real pleasures are in the world-weary, emotionally bruised intimate mood it creates between Knight's slightly androgynous singing and Paridjanian's slide-happy guitar accompaniment.

That comes with delicate string and piano decoration on the gorgeous opener Feeling Oblivion, a gently bluesy stomp on Underdog (Save Me) with the likes of Emergency, 72 and By TV Light offering a line in ambient folk which help to make The Optimist LP an album that will kept haunting until those best-of-the-year lists are compiled.

Label: Source