Coming Up For Air – Phil Wilson (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Because we live in a world where everything needs to have an appropriate label and people have gone to war over the wrong sub-genre being attributed to a particular artist or album, I feel the need to make an important distinction when describing Phil Wilson’s latest e.p. Some might describe it as dream-pop, but I would rather opt for the term dreamy-pop, for whilst it does wander the same hazy and sonorous pathways of the former, it is built on a confident and robust pop structure, beats are solid, guitar lines chime or soar rather than blur and fuzz and the vocals walk the perfect line between dreamscape and drama.

The title track is a touch of louche and languid brilliance, a hazy torpor of sound that sits on a groove equidistant between Wilco and The Church…if you can imagine such a thing. I can. Opening salvo Glad I Don’t Know takes a more drifting indie pop vibe and Anarchy in Our Guitars and Regrets sit somewhere between the solid frameworks and the transient beauty that Coming Up For Air is built on.

Dream-pop with a gym membership? Washed through indie without the fashion fixations? Pop music built more from fluidity than hook? Who cares? It’s great and that’s what matters and it also does that rare thing these days of filling a hole in the generic map and also cleverly sits mid way between cultish and commercial. Who would have thought that one e.p. could join so many dots?