These New Puritans – Crooked Wing

What’s immediately shocking about the new These New Puritans record is the absence of any great shock. For a band whose whole existence has been defined by instrumental about-faces, Crooked Wing and 2019’s Inside the Rose makes for a stunningly logical jump; for once feeling like a sharpening rather than a total shift. Bells, for instance, feels like it could well have sat on that previous record, but has had any fat stripped away, and is all the richer for its sparseness. This refinement of sound really works, to the extent that if the record has a duff track it’s Wild Fields, which eschews the album’s usual subterranean beauty for something more muscular, but never quite escapes feeling like a dulled memory of 2010’s Hidden.

As much as has been made over the years about their esoteric methods, what they've always managed to do as a band is keep clever-clever at bay. This continues on Crooked Wing. For all their hifalutin techniques, they remain at their sublime best when most heart-on-sleeve. The organ sounds that emerge like beams of divine light throughout the record are a case in point of this; they elevate the title track into something rousing and joyful, but are employed with a pinpoint emotional judgment. It feels emblematic of the record as a whole; sounds scientific in their precise beauty, but arranged with an instinctive, emotive sense of timing. It’s their ability to walk this line that makes them remain a group that can balance the elliptical and the ecstatic like few else.

Listen to: Crooked Wing, The Old World, Bells