DARLINGSIDE

Extralife 7/10

Post-millennial blues on second album from Boston alt.folk quartet

If Darlingside’s 2015 debut Birds Say was full of nostalgia for lost childhood, the follow-up seems swathed in postTrump gloom. “We’re a long way from the best of times,” they sing on both the opening and closing tracks of an album on which apocalypse is never far away – the storm is about to break, there’s something in the water and “the paint is peeling off a dream”. Salvation lies in juxtaposing their dystopian vision against surging Beach Boys harmonies (the title track), gentle Simon & Garfunkel loveliness (“Singularity”) and the bucolic reverie of “Futures”, which sounds felicitously like a companion to Fleet Foxes’ “Sun It Rises”.