Reviewed by Oscar Hyde

British-Australian singer/songwriter Beales here strips his focus back to songwriting: "a song about the moon, a song about a miss, a song about a tragedy, a song about the next day." He opens with a lunar twilight serenade, vaguely jazzy noodling floating over dusky synths. Beales' voice is almost straight out of '70s soft rock and the music's nicely retro, set just a decade later, swelling in the bridge with tasteful brass. The second song, "Signals", chugs along on deep rumbling acoustic guitar sprung from somewhere between Elbow's "The Bones Of You" and "Grounds For Divorce" and soon erupts into distorted guitars in serpentine 7/4 riffs. The title track takes cues from Coldplay or U2, but in the best possible way; the glorious rising chords of the wordless bridge are as rousing as any melody I've heard this year, and a good deal more technically complex, while the lyrics for the rest of the song manage to be as thought-provoking as the Pink Floyd track of the same name. The closing "P R S M" plods a bit more than the rest of the EP, but still remains melodically interesting and provides a more-than-adequate darkly inspiring finale.

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