Lisa O Piu – When This Was The Future (Subliminal Sounds)

It’s a hard life for your budding quirky pop pixette these days. Folk fairies in ‘interesting’ hats have been making men with beards earnestly nod for decades, but every generation the ante gets upped when a genuine genius peeps out of the hedgerow. Joni Mitchell really buggered the sixties and seventies up for everyone else. Björk stomped on the whimsy of a thousand would-be wistful warblers. When Lisa O Piu (or just plain Lisa Isaksson as she’s known to her mum) first heard Joanna Newsom, who knows whether she was inspired to follow or felt doomed to stay in her shadow. Either way, she made a pretty, quirky, folky album about odd relationships, fantastical parties and horses dying of grass sickness. The comparison was never going to be far away. So, does post-Newsom have to mean sub-Newsom?

Well, yeah. A bit. Joanna Newsom is brilliant. But Lisa O Piu isn’t far behind. Lush, layered songs twinkle with Swedish sparseness like a lingonberry trifle or a particularly polished Ikea bookcase. Maybe. The band (who look wonderful by the way, Google them, they’re perfect) have apparently locked themselves away in a shack on the beautiful coast of somewhere I’d never heard of to work on the album, as is the way of these things. Blah. I’m imagining the shack was pretty well stocked with toys and gizmos, as each track has half a dozen little signature flourishes that speak of happy musicians at play. Strummed piano strings, funky old mic effects, even a bit of plucked harp (the cheek!) glisten on top of swelling orchestration in a way that could have been a real mess but is more of an exotic tiffin box. A bit of this, a bit of that. All tasty.

Stephen Taylor