PENNY ARCADE - Double Exposure - CD

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CD Double Exposure isn’t a departure, necessarily, but this new album contains some of the rawest and most deconstructed sounds that James Hoare – of Veronica Falls, Ultimate Paint ing and Proper Ornaments – has recorded to date. Principally, and for the first time, the guitars take a back seat. It’s not a ‘no guitar’ concept album by any means; it’s mostly just the way it came together. It would also be inaccurate to suggest the guitars have been banished altogether, especially after the dual six-string solo that rips through the speakers on the mighty album opener Regrets. It’s not ‘Skynyrd’ necessarily, but it’s a hairs-on-end experience for sure. Following 2024’s gorgeous Backwater Collage debut LP under the Penny Arcade nom de plume, this is a hallucinogenic experience, and the backbone of Double Exposure is the drum machine that informed the songs. It’s also an album of sweet duality. For all the darkness of early highlight Worst Trip – a haunting stagger through “the worst trip I ever had” – the following You’ve Got the Key is a gorgeously knotty workout, so rich in a distinctly English take on psychedelia that it’s hard not to believe it was recorded to tape fifty years ago. The mood then swaps sunny psychedelics for a slice of blue-eyed soul on Everything’s Easy, the soundtrack to melancholic, sunshine-stained car journeys. The album features flashes of guest appearances, but for the vast majority it is an album of solo experimentalism, with gestations that bubble to life across the stereo before fading back out again. Nothing is overthought; this is an album of ideas. The drum machines take centre stage on Rear View Mirror, playing out like In Rainbows-era Radiohead channelled through Silver Apples, a trip in three minutes that you can play on an infinite loop. Like so much of the album, it was recorded almost instantaneously, with a simplicity and rawness that heavy overdubs and meticulous arrangements could never achieve. It is an album high on vibe. James explains: “I was preparing to move to the south of France when half of the album was recorded. This fed into the lo-fi feel of the record; it had to be recorded quickly and that does give some of the tracks a demo-like quality.” When one of the album’s many highlights is a hazy two-minute cut called Instrumental No. 1, you know this is about rolling the tape and capturing the vibe. Clicking drum machines and oozing organs interplay with different hues of guitar work, from the ragas of the George Harrison-esque Early Morning to the tripped-out, smoke-drenched We Used to Be Good Friends. Double Exposure is an unfussy collection of songs. Closing track Riverside Drive – like so many of the album’s sublimely melancholic highs – appears, fully forms, then dissolves, never outstaying its welcome and softly ringing in the ears like a daydream. It is also a fitting title. Double Exposure, named after the photographic technique, is layers of ideas that weren’t written as parts but rather spontaneous melodies that form their own abstract picture. The album harks somewhere between the restless experimentation of Syd Barrett and the uninhibited analogue innovations of Tim Presley as White Fence. It very much is what it is. “The record was recorded on a 16-track tape machine, and much of it was captured instantaneously as it just sounded the way it needed right there and then,” James recalls. “Most of the songs feature old, very basic drum machines and organs; trying to recreate any aspect of it is like trying to bottle smoke. Rupert Morrison Show more