Plaid // Scintilli

I have to confess that I’ve been out of the Plaid loop for a while so I was very eager to get Scinitlli into my CD player when it fell through my letterbox. And what I was greeted with was not what I was expecting, but I was certainly not disappointed. The opening track, Missing, channels Sigur Ros in their more acoustic moments, before we’re torn away from our reverie with Eye Robot, a much dirtier, electronic affair. And it’s glorious. One of the defining elements of this album is its diversity, but it still manages to hold together as a single work somehow. By track 4 we’ve got elements of Dr Who, before being thrown a smattering of Efterklang and some hints of one time collaborator Bjork. Scintilli has apparently been something of a labour of love for Plaid, and indeed they claim to chant the word for 2 hours every morning as a kind of self-affirming mantra (it means ‘I am many sparks’). They’ve also calculated that each beat contained on the album has taken roughly one day to construct. Now that’s some attention to detail. Overall, Scinitilli presses a lot of my buttons, and you should let it have a poke at yours too.

8/10 BBV