LOST PROPERTY

There's a subtle folk influence in the music of Turin Brakes, but theirs is not music you're ever going to hear around a campfire on a chilly evening; instead, this is folk music for moody young people pondering life and love alone in their bedrooms late at night, and the fact group founders and key songwriters Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian still have anything to say about these subjects 15 years after their first LP is a testimony to their enduring strength as both writers and recording artists. Arriving in 2016, Lost Property is dominated by gentle but thoughtful melodies built around guitar patterns where electric and acoustic sounds walk hand in hand, accompanied by dynamic bursts of keyboards and strings. The lines of these tracks are impressively clean and polished; while the performances often seem languid, the group's clever use of the relief between the loud and the quiet brings Lost Property an impact that's big and spacious, and the sweetly sad tone of the vocals is a good match for the emotions of the music, imaging a young person's world with the experience of a middle-aged man to draw upon. In fact, Turin Brakes evoke the sound of a young man's lovelorn view of the world so vividly that it's a bit hard to imagine this band has been around since 2001 and hasn't fully matured into a group with more to say about the long-term relationships that are the stuff of adult lives. But if Turin Brakes' world-view has changed little over the years, their embrace of the craft of record-making has only improved, and Lost Property is an impressive document of their skills in the recording studio. ~ Mark Deming