Cave Painting - You’ll Be Running Soon

The acoustics of Cave Painting’s EP certainly attest to being recorded in some large, echo-encouraging space in the wilderness, and they do work in fairly broad strokes. Playing within the borders of that paradoxical sort-of lo-fi, arena-rock sound - y’know, everything sounds very ‘widescreen’, but it’s an old, cheaper CRT telly rather than unnecessarily flashy HD; think current Foals, not U2 - across a quartet of songs where percussion and falsetto vocals take centre stage, with high-note guitars and sprinkles of keyboards make up the supporting cast.

Verging between chill-out ambience and tropical (that’s ‘world music’ dressed up by people who are made uncomfortable by the term ‘world music’, even in this post-Vampire Weekend musical landscape) rhythms with effortless cool and ease, Cave Painting keep things dynamic enough without ever compromising their sound. There’s a palatable sense of high drama to the proceedings, but altogether more reserved and subtle than contemporaries who may be mining influences from a similar era.

Basically, if Wild Beasts got their collective nose out of the top-shelf material, their collective mind out of the gutter, put on some nice clothes and bought a bouquet of flowers, they might sound a little like this.