Super review by Cal Gibson, of The Secret Soul Society.

Pop music infused with melancholy and smudged with regret is a well-worn trope, but producer Lewie Day – aka Tornado Wallace – and singer songwriter Alia Seror-O’Neill bring a wide-eyed innocence to proceedings that can’t help but win you over. 

The beats clickety clack, the melodies unfurl, the existential angst gets soundly whipped up, and everyone goes home with a secret smile somewhere about their person. Light and shade, darkness uncovered, the plight of the individual in a world devoid of pity: the themes are universal, the touch is crystalline and assured. Sure they’ve been mainlining The Cocteau Twins for breakfast but there’s nothing wrong in that: this is mood music pimped out for an after-hours throwdown, the lonely cry of the hunter and the hunted, etched onto wax and sent spinning into the ether.

Rain Down is a louche offering, all tear-stained glances and the belated realisation that life always twists away from wherever you think it might be heading. A torch song rejigged for the end times, hearts breaking endlessly: Badalamenti beefed up and boiled right back down to basics. Cold Feeling is precisely that: a heaviness upon the waters, summer always ending, youth and joy and simple pleasures all but forgotten. Bass reconfigured for the darkest of nights, humanity stretched out on the rack, begging for forgiveness. Icy arctic adventures. Thinking is a cerebral groove thang: low-lit angles of the mind uncovered and examined, neurons fired up and bound for the disco. Chunky and funky: low-end theory for late night philosophers.

The vocals work perfectly with the cinescope vibes of the soundbeds, Seror- O’Neill’s voice weaving in and out of the jagged sonic rocks, pressure building and subsiding, waves of sadness washing through the whole scenario. It’s a canny concoction, a world-weary assemblage of ’round midnight woes and early morning epiphanies. It’s pop music on steroids: diving beneath the shiny surfaces and uncovering the dirt beneath the dancefloor. a.s.o. (lower case please) is an arch and accomplished debut. It’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.

a.s.o. is out now on Low Lying Records.