With “Island Lantern Festival”, Tony Frissore manages to soundtrack a specific kind of mental vacation I didn’t realize I was overdue for taking. Ostensibly an instrumental nod to the Lunar New Year and the hopefulness of renewal, this piece operates less like a celebration and more like a gentle exhalation. https://open.spotify.com/album/3n43BcxSnavYKC0wt28GNu?si=E_50eQ_lQomyHT1RsD2Jrg It starts wet with the actual crash of ocean waves before slowly drifting inland. I...

There is a particular shade of electric blue that appears on the inside of your eyelids when you rub your eyes too hard, a colour that feels both artificial and deeply biological, and that is precisely where Vacant Shores and their new EP, "Vacant Shores", seem to reside. Jon Elliott, AJ ‘Sid’ Sidford, and Suzy Alderton have managed to capture something peculiarly British here;...