Day And Night

On their second album, Movietone went hermetic, the seven songs here among their most claustrophobic. Day & Night can sound shuttered in, home-bound – the lonely quietude of “Blank Like Snow” is all wintry attics and hoarfrost, a spindly acoustic guitar underpinning Kate Wright’s evocative murmurs. The singles – “Useless Landscape” and “Sun Drawing” – pull tighter on Movietone’s relationship with chamber jazz, while “Summer” levitates on scratchy arcs of droning violin. The ten-minute, closing folk mantra, “The Crystallisation of Salt at Night,” is drowsily played, covered in a blanket of humidity.