Jo Mango - Paperclips and Sand

It's a blessing and a curse that 'Paperclips and Sand' opens with a song like My Lung. Over a shivering, echoing thumb piano, Glasgow's Jo Mango sings her pretty, simple tune. Lyrically it's unremarkable, but there's something so marvellous in that wobbly musicbox backing, the concentric rings of percussion and voice. Sadly, the rest of the record is a return to acoustic guitar and rote girl-with-guitar tropes, love lost and cherished. Usually I'm a sucker for that kinda stuff, the sweet and sentimental, but I'm not being suckered tonight; instead I wait for Miss Mango to leave the ordinary for the extra - to choose small stories instead of broad ones, to choose ghostly plink-ink-ink over a mundane strum. [Sean Michaels]