Swimmer One - Outliers

Reissues are big business nowadays, but while they’re often big-money vinyl cash cows, they can sometimes simply serve as an introduction to an artist overlooked years earlier.

And this collection by Edinburgh-based act Swimmer One offers fans of crafted electronic pop the chance to catch up on a lesser-known,although“critically acclaimed” gem from two decades ago. Popular with the media types of 2003 more than the record-buying public, their champions included the likes of Mark Radcliffe, Rob Da Bank, and Steve Lamacq – now veterans of the industry.

However, the trio’s music, while now ‘vintage’, still sounds fresh, vibrant, and futuristic.

‘Outliers’ compiles together non-album tracks from across the trio’s career, and thus a twinkling sequencer intro announcing their arrival with debut single, and manifesto of sorts: ‘We Just Make Music For Ourselves’.

A chronological As and Bs collection, ‘Outliers’ is not a standard long-player, though more experimental flipside ‘Talk Me Down From 20,000 Feet’ is no less of a tune, despite starting with radio chatterfromanimperilledaircraft.

‘Come On Let’s Go’ was the trio’s second release, the channelling of New Order and The Blue Nile somehow again not spawning a hit single or filling the floors of indie discos, while ‘Lake Tahoe’ is a curiously endearing melange of synthesizer noises and robotic vocal. There’s also, before it became the inthing, a Kate Bush cover, ‘Cloudbusting’, whose me- tallic percussive beat makes it sound as if the song was always destined for a 21st century electro makeover.

Thetrioevenprovideanew tune, ‘Twenty Years Too Soon, Twenty Years Too Late’, which fairly motors along, sounding

as fresh as anything from 20

years before and bodes very well for the future.

Whether it’s a renaissance or a reformation, hopefully the band are making, as they suggest in the closing slice of futuro-techno, ‘Music For Other People’ too.