Plastic Animals - Pictures From the Blackout (2016)

To say that things around Plastic Animals tend to move slowly would be an understatement. Apparently they've been around in one form or another for as long as Eagleowl, who are a sort of Edinburgh byword for taking your own sweet time with your music, but Eagleowl's debut album came out in 2013 and erm... here we still are.

It even affected us, in the end. This was recorded and the final mixes okayed over the course of almost two painstaking years, and STILL we spent months going back and forth over the tracklisting, and we're usually the kind of people who can get through that kind of job in a single evening.

Musically, they define themselves as atmospheric sludge rock, and that works pretty well for me. It's indie rock, I suppose, but flavoured with shoegaze and krautrock (particularly in some of the longer ones), and in fact, as can happen with this kind of music, some of the longest and most impenetrable tracks are probably the album's standout songs.