The Heart Strings - Try Fly Blue Sky (2008)

Genre : Indie,Pop

Tracklist

01. Kids 4:03

02. Cannonball Stan 4:20

03. He wanted to fly and he flew 3:04

04. Pedalo 4:47

05. Jose Fernandez 3:13

06. Mariana 3:55

07. The new golden days 4:09

08. Nina and her very long hair 3:19

09. Her new disaster 4:13

10. Cosmos 3:32

11. General Sherman 3:25

12. 1942 3:01

The world could do far worse than have more music by The Heart Strings in it. Co-produced by Julian Simmonds, who you'll know from his work with Guillemots and Midlake, Try Fly Blue Sky is the same kind of summery, happy, gentle pop that might have escaped from a Bella Union sampler when no-one was looking.

With a lyrical quirkiness that sits somewhere between Jim Noir and The Decemberists, filled with melodies driven more by piano than guitar, The Heart Strings are feelgood music for days when you're too busy smiling to worry about being cool.

Recalling great purveyors of unashamedly shiny pop from Guillemots to Captain to The Feeling, Try Fly Blue Sky could be Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band without the drugs. In a good way, you understand. The lovely Pedal, for instance, sidles along with the type of rythmns you might employ on a pedalo headed to the centre of a clear blue lake.

Brothers Todd (vocals, guitar, keyboards, co-producing) and Max (drums, piano) Roache do look like stationery salesmen, but that's a minor gripe when they serenade you so beautifully. While most of TFBY isn't overtly intended to be full of love songs, the gentleness and tenderness of the tunes ends up fulfilling that function admirably.

It's the state Massive Attack called Mezzanine, the same headspace occupied by Bill Murray in Lost In Translation: those sensations halfway between sleep and wakefulness brought on by jet-lag or over-indulgence, when reality seems remote and unreachable beyond the hotel window or a mental fug. And it’s the place Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier inhabit on their third album, trapped – as the title suggests – in the twilight zone between day and night.

For while The Sun & The Neon Light is very obviously the creation of two men still in love with the dancefloor, it also probes into the stresses a long-standing and intense affair with clubland can put on your relationships with the outside world.