Angst remains an ever valuable commodity in the rock world, so welcome Derbyshire’s Haiku Salut, whose debut album shines a rainbow-coloured beam of unadulterated happiness across the sky without once having to resort to words.
If this is setting off your twee detector already, don’t panic. Tricolore has charm to spare, but it never becomes sickly. Electronic loops and samples sound atypically bucolic, opener Say It twinkles away like a galaxy. Acoustic guitars, accordions, trumpets, pianos and glockenspiels in hand, the band waltz, they swoon, they skip and (hell, why not) they even polka.
It’s the kind of music made for exploring the woods, making dens and reliving childhood summers, warm and beautiful and searching for joy in every corner. But best of all, there’s no one really like them out there at the moment. Sure, they share extra-terrestrial bleeps and electro-dreams with The Postal Service, alongside the glitchy warmth of Iceland’s múm, the marching, Mediterranean, brassy antiquity of Beirut and even flashes of Ravel.
But this is classically influenced dreampop that’s as English as Victorian pictures of fairies at the bottom of the garden, and just as magical.
