The Fat Angel Sings

Aquilo who have been getting some nice press across the Internet  the duo Tom Higham and Ben Fletcher.

It’s official: there is no such thing as a bad musical entity from the Lake District.  Aquilo are possibly the best of the lot from that area. We like raw power as much as the next noisehead but if you’re going to offer the opposite it should always be as limpidly lovely as Aquilo’s, as dreamily atmospheric and addicted to melancholy. Neighbours since they were kids, 23-year-old music production graduate Tom Higham and Ben Fletcher (he’s 19) are getting used to their music being described as “beautiful” and “gorgeous”, although they’re accustomed to a different response, mainly because they were in rock bands: Higham threw shapes onstage to thrash metal while Fletcher lunged around making grunge. As career moves go – these days they use laptops and Logic to create dolorous downtempo electronica and ethereal R&B  They have been compared to Mount Kimbie and London Grammar, the latter particularly pleasing to Aquilo because they were “blown away” as soon as they heard them. You can probably discern the influence of the xx in the production/arrangements (although we can hear more of Air in their lush, layered, quiet immensity and Slowdive in their sunburst linear shimmer) and in the vocals the soothing mid-range sound of… well, we were going to say Chris Martin, only minus his self-regard and with a choirboy innocence and winning wistfulness. There are six songs out there to collect and treasure, each one harmonically rich, with chord sequences designed for maximum poignancy and lyrics that allude to heartache.