The bright and buoyant Brighton scene is staking a claim for producing some of the most interesting new bands out there. Take, for example, the excellent array of new artists such as The Go! Team, British Sea Power, Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, Chungking and Electrelane to name a brief few.
And you can add Air Formation to the list while you're at it, even though AF are easier to categorize. They produce some exellent old school Shoegazing sounds.You remember the early 90s and the term that lumped together the likes of Slowdive, Pale
Saints, Chapterhouse and Lush and was taken to an artistic pinnacle by the exceptional My Bloody Valentine?
Yeah? You do? Well, this album is entirley accessible and completly atmospheric in that same respect: concieved with all the expected floating echoes of pop structure with the embedded vocal integrated as an additional instrument and mixed as ethereally as you'd imagine. Clearly trying to shake the stigma of genre was never the intention of Air Formation.
But for all that, there is a lot to be enjoyed on “Stay Inside, Feel Everything.” The opening tracks "Turns Into Sky" and "Fallen Leaves" are heavily influenced by My Bloody Valentine's special feedback formula but still excel on their own terms. Equal to these is " Seethrustars", which has an ascendancy of great spacious warmth.
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In fact, this album is of consistently high quality thoughout, but you just feel it's all been done before and that however good Air Formation are (and they are good) such an obvious homage seems unlikely to break though commercially on its' own terms in a significant way.
Still, it never fails on energy and flow and while Air Formation’s expansive textures, sweeping drones and all-embracing space rock is fitting for the past AND the future, it might just help this whole 'nu-shoegazing' thing in our midst take off.
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