While Echo Lake probably haven't been around long enough to accrue expectations from a fan base, their new album, "Wild Peace," which is due out June 26 on Slumberland Records, might surprise listeners who enjoyed the "buzzy gloop" that inundated last year's "Young Silence" EP.
"I wanted ['Wild Peace'] to be as ‘anti lo-fi’ as possible and sound as slick as possible," songwriter Thom Hill said in an interview with Talk Rock To Me earlier this month. "You can’t just jump in to exploit [the hype] and then make a mistake."
The audio stream for this album is no longer available, but you can check out some sample tracks at Echo Lake's soundcloud.
Echo Lake, which formed as an art school two-piece in late 2010, drew comparisons to preeminent shoegazers My Bloody Valentine for their first release's gauzy, saturated sound.
However, the London band's debut full-length bucks the hype, shifting the conversation away from aggressive noise, toward droning swells and twinkling melodies.
While Echo Lake recorded "Wild Peace" in a similar manner to their EP -- supposedly using whatever equipment was at hand -- the result sounds a lot more mature this time around.
As its name suggests, "Wild Peace" is more calming than chaotic. The album crawls languidly out of bed, sleepy, yet retaining fragments of vivid dreams. It stews on that pace until its midpoint, when cleaned-up retakes of "Young Silence" and "In Dreams" rev up the tempo.
But nothing feels rushed, and the mood is never broken. Even the slow burning rockers that punctuate the tail end of "Wild Peace" fearlessly meander to crescendos. Singer Linda Jarvis' ex-choir girl voice is much lovelier now that you can make out her words, although lyrical substance is a secondary element in the album's enchanting soundscapes.
Like "Loveless," My Bloody Valentine's magnum opus, "Wild Peace" is a triumph of refinement, but the comparisons should stop there. This is not a band that is lurking in anyone's shadow, but one that's matured rapidly through its own clarity of purpose.