Album review: Wave Machines, Pollen (Neapolitan)

Liverpool art-rockers Wave Machines return, after three years, with a chiselled record of synth pop, rich with squiggles and shimmer.

Singer Tim Bruzon scales dizzy heights again with his falsetto, approaching Prince levels of insinuation on the funk of "Ill Fit" – a highlight – while making more melancholic lament elsewhere on the album (which even includes a eulogy for the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers who died in 2004, on the title track).