Love Echo - I Promise You Always The Sky

Luxembourg via Tokyo. That’s a Venn diagram with little overlapping, but that’s the globe trotting nature of ambient dream-pop duo Love Echo. Most of the talk before the release has been about their remarkably refreshing take on The Cure’s 1983 single ‘The Love Cats’, which you’ve probably heard at some point in your life, but producer Vic Miranda hadn’t before this project, and so what you have is a downbeat piano-laden track that until the familiar lyrics of the chorus kick in, you’d be forgiven for thinking was an original piece of work. But that’s their charm. The duo’s particular brand of lo-fi electronics can occasionally share a lot of attributes with white noise, but as vocalist Vicki Glass repeatedly explains on the dizzying ‘Eligy’, “it’s all a lucid dream”, which is probably a more accurate description than any reviewer can come up with.

It sounds horribly cliched, but they do what they do well. When they play to their strengths, as with the Love Cry-esque ‘We’ and the thumping ‘Hush’, they showcase a genuine song crafting talent, but they seem to have spread themselves too thinly across the rest of the record. It becomes hard to distinguish between tracks, and the likes ‘Control’ and ‘One’ are the very definition of album filler. By the end it all sounds quite tired and uninspired, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough ammunition to get them across the finish line.

It’s not all doom and gloom, and while ‘Daybreak’ provides some additional enjoyment, there doesn’t seem to be a track strong enough to stop them being labelled as ‘the guys who did that Cure cover’. It is a shame, because they’re more enjoyable than a lot of bands using a similar sound, and there is definitely potential, but unfortunately ‘I Promise You Always The Sky’ just doesn’t realise it.