Turbines

Flux is the keyword in Tunng's story, from its 2003 beginnings as a loose East London collective through to the tight, touring band ethic of 2010's And Then We Saw Land, the first album without founding member Sam Genders. For Turbines, they changed their working methods yet again, starting off with a series of jam sessions in Mike Lindsay's adopted home of Reykjavik. These were edited by Lindsay and electronics wizard Phil Winter before the players relocated to a studio in Dorset for two weeks of intensive writing and recording. The result is a more concise, more direct and more vivid record of Tunng's folk-pop psychedelia at work and at play.

It still has the pastoral, hazy charm of earlier albums, but the ear-catching synths – drawn from the album's engineer and vintage equipment expert Ben ‘Benge’ Edward's ‘synth museum’ – and the more dynamic drum-bass-guitar song structures bring them down to earth. Perhaps it's due to those early band sessions in Iceland, but there's a stronger, firmer footing here. Lindsay describes it as ‘sci-fi folk pop, and he and co-vocalist Becky Jacobs share duties and harmonies across the nine tracks. The closing ‘Heavy Rock Warning’ is the most skeletal and most distinctive, with a pretty vocal melody and a lyric about casting off and casting away on a cosmic scale, its analogue synths wandering off on their own until the final enveloping silence.