- Label: 'Tough Love Records'
- Genre: 'Pop'
- Release Date: '25th August 2017'
Our Rating:
Light in Your Mind is the London-based band's first new material in two years, and their first album since 2014.
Amidst numerous line-up changes since their formation in 2011, the song writing duo of Jack Cleverly and Dan Simons has remained a constant.
Having started out with the sole intention of “having fun” this has been anything but the case in recent years with divorce, betrayal, addiction, and illness being among the downers the two have had to contend with.
“The song Decay, and to an extent the album as a whole, is about getting comfortable with decay, accepting decay”, says Cleverly.
The second track Car Crash faces up to some of these issues and, despite the upbeat arrangement, the lyrics (“I’m a car crash/I’m a river”) tell a different story.
The album title comes from the song Where Nothing Can Be Defined and while this is another song about soul searching it still manages to be dance-friendly in a similar vein to the Pet Shop Boys. This tone is helped by the snazzy production job done by Kristian Robinson.
That said, the short brooding instrumentals (My Body (Winter Mix) & Euphoric Recoil) together with the closing piano ballad (Lifetime Achievement Award) send the message that this record is very far from being just a bunch of carefree dance floor fillers.
Overall, though, glimmers of hope shine through and the final line -"Just become all the things you've done" - sums up the sanguine but optimistic spirit. After all, as Morrissey so famously observed, beyond the melancholy, there is a light that never goes out.
