Album: Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions, Through the Devil...(Nettwerk)

A second collaboration between the Mazzy Star singer and her Bloody Valentine, Colm O Ciosoig.

It's quiet, dramatic and harmonically narrow – its trajectory being about as flat as you can imagine: acoustic guitars, tinkly bells, cellos, whispers... Suitably enough, it actually sounds like a Californian/Irish hybrid, the marriage of hollow-eyed self-absorption and pastoral romanticism solemnised in an imaginary garden of sound. Petals, ivy and broken gravestones. Not a compost heap to be seen.