Islet – Celebrate This Place

Little is known about Welsh quartet, Islet, a band which eschews the postmodern trappings of MySpace, Twitter and the like in favour of a low key – but high intensity – musical existence. Typically baseless PR hyperbole about sounding like 'a paean to the joy of sound and being' actually makes a fair bit of sense in this case: Celebrate This Place is held together by the simple desire to make a glorious racket with their instruments, which they do grandly. The rhythmic prowess and ethereal mid-range of tracks like Holly, Jasmine and One Of These Worlds is indicative of more than just a casual krautrock influence, while the fractured chants of opener We Shall Visit recall the indie bombast of a Gang Gang Dance triumph. This fine debut is hampered slightly by a less than perfect production quality, but put them in the right studio environment and I swear they will do serious damage. [Martin Skivington]