Rating: 8 / Label: Ghost Box
Asever with Ghost Box, the concepts and packaging colour the reception ofthe music. The guiding thread here is the idea, originating with HPLovecraft and repeated by the likes of Erich von Daniken and NigelKneale, that Earth was visited by alien cultures deep in prehistory.The image of high technology in the ancient past has an obviousresonance for Ghost Box, who have always enjoyed the paradoxicalposition of being nostalgic for a lost popular modernism. Whilstoccasionally ominous, Belbury Poly’s take on these themes tends to the wonderstruck and the quirky rather than the dark.
There’s a certain jauntiness in Belbury Poly’sanalogue-heavy sound: they longingly recall a time when electronicmusic was embedded into everyday British life (via radio station identsand TV theme tunes), but their loving reconstructions have ajingle-fresh brightness; a quirky good humour, that moreselfconsciously cool revivals of radiophonia eschew. That said, thestand-out track, ‘A Year And A Day’, shivers with sadness: with itsplangent acoustic guitar and a vocal sample that sounds as if it is arecording of a séance being broadcast on shortwave radio, it resemblesa dreamy confection of Delia Derbyshire and Durutti Column.
K-Punk