7 track album
avant-outre-pop jams from Leeds-based (Burley? Kirkstall? Going from the postcode in the title) bedroom pop savant STEVIE.EH.
pushing at the same deranged corners where Ariel Pink goes, though I’d argue that where Pink uses lo-fi and tape hiss to smear his otherwise arena-sized ambitions, EH uses ineptitude, dissonance, and injudiciously-deployed effects. i don’t say that as a diss either. it gives the EP a delicate poise on the edge of a collapse that never comes.
as both a criticism and a positive comment, EH also has an ear for some brilliant sounds that can’t quite be incorporated or integrated more fully into the shifting sands that his songs seem to lie upon. but there’s so much happening per tune that maybe it’s a puzzle i didn’t solve yet.
i’d also suggest that the general baseline of EH’s weirdness would make songs not so aggressively mutated with effects still feel weird and uncanny and beautiful, because it comes through as much in the artist’s personality as it does with the tweaking of knobs on a console/pedal/computer screen. but this is worth a listen. (6.5)