Sea Power ★★★ Everything Was Forever ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP/MC

First album since they were British Sea Power. Their seventh in all.

Since “it’s possible to misapprehend the name British Sea Power” (although who might “misapprehend” remains unclear), British Sea Power became Sea Power in August. Their first LP since 2017’s patchy Let The

Dancers Inherit The Party finds the sextet returning to their complex basics. There’s the richly layered instrumentation, there’s musical uplift and there are Yan Scott Wilkinson’s vocals, distant but concerned in the manner of Psychedelic Fur Richard Butler. They hurl curveballs such as the twinkling guitar motif that propels Fire Escape In The Sea and the almost Giorgio Moroder-esque backing to Folly. It’s an exhilarating listen, and when they rock out on Two Fingers it’s genuinely thrilling, while the stentorian We Only Want To Make You Happy moves like a musical galleon. They still struggle for hooks, though: solve that problem and they’d be almost perfect.