Lonely Ghosts Don't Get Lost Or Hurt

Don't be led astray by the multi-member moniker - Lonely Ghosts is essentially just Tom Denney, and, really, who can blame him for retreating to the bedroom? Firstly, while these may be boom times for artists who would once have been fanzine favourites, the middle part of this decade was rather less kind to the twee-inclined, which meant Denney's tenure with Help She Can't Swim was an often-overlooked one. Also, this might not be the year's most carnal release, but it'd be fair to say that everything he's written here tends towards the intimate to the point whereby there's virtually no acknowledgement of anyone other than the protagonist and his girlfriend.

If you think that's the kind of singlemindedness seldom seen since the days of Sarah Records, you'd be right, and it's far from the only anti-landfill indie touchstone that Denney stumbles across here. His vocals - at least when he's singing rather than having a bit of a yelp - bring to mind both Barney Sumner and Kele Okereke, and he's got an appealing-sounding record collection well beyond those similarities. With its clarinet and horn backing, Maybe You Could Save Me recalls the pastoral pop of 1983 or thereabouts, and vibrant opener So Young, So Beautiful is a punk-inflected pop screamer of the sort Graham Coxon specialises in at his most galvanised. Better yet, Happy Lovers / Friends Forever appears to be the missing link between Pavement and OMD. Now there's a phrase we never expected to be typing!

Inevitably, too, given that this is something of a bedsit effort, there's all kinds of electro enticement in store. What with their namecheck in You! Me! Dancing! and Manda Rin's magnificent comeback album, it really is about time Bis were properly re-evaluated, and Denney would appear to go along with that wholeheartedly too: Plough Through, the album's big pop statement, is almost entirely suffused with what we used to call Teen-C power, while the staggeringly restless Good Times takes it frenetic keyboard and drum machine cues from the selfsame source. Intriguingly, he's even had a stab at new rave, drawing on its anything-goes early days for the fierily club-charming yet naively philosophical The Unpopular Future to satisfying effect.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, Don't Get Lost Or Hurt may be a little on the trifling side, and, at under half an hour, it's not one for demanding too much from the listener's life. Nonetheless, there's a more significant audience for such adept DIY these days than there has been for years, and there's a lot to be said for Lonely Ghosts clawing his way out of the where-are-they-now? file in such fine spirits...