Milkteeth, the third LP from art-pop savant Douglas Dare, is about as baroque as pop can get. There is plenty of Rufus Wainwright and Sufjan Stevens to the stirring chamber arrangements of tracks like ‘Silly Games’, while Dare’s combination of stateliness, poise and a rather British kind of outsider-artist sensibility channels the best of Patrick Wolf. Erased Tapes might be best known for instrumental music, but Douglas Dare’s Milkteeth adds new strings to the bow of both label and artist. Douglas Dare returns to Erased Tapes with his introspective song-writerly craft, but his third outing Milkteeth sees the English singer-songwriter strip back on the sonics for a disarmingly intimate affair. ‘Silly Games’ is a paean to the loss of childhood innocence, told through Dare’s dulcet vocal and his newfound instrumental joy — the autoharp — which bestows all of Milkteeth with the rustic musk of a folk classic.
