Casper Clausen

★★★ Better Way CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP

Efterklang’s yearning voice takes a first solo flight.

The pulse of Used To Think echoes Spacemen 3’s Big City. Yet it’s his vocal which characterises the longing percolating through Better

Way’s opening cut. That voice is the crucial element of the frequently seductive first solo outing from Efterklang’s frontperson Casper Clausen. He and the band are Danish, but he lives in Portugal. Another ex-pat there is Spacemen 3’s former co-linchpin, UK-born Sonic Boom – who recorded the album in their adopted country. The internationalism is reflected by the music’s diversity. Dominated by Clausen’s incantatory singing, Feel It Coming is a mood piece edging towards trip-hop. Snow White is more fragmented – Talk Talk filtered through Kid A

– but it’s that intimate, sinuous vocal which worms in. While the early Efterklang of Springer and Tripper comes to mind,

Better Way begs to be fleshedout in a live setting. Kieron Tyler