Talk about a finished meal after a long time in a very slow cooker. Neil Dexter’s debut album came into being between the summer of 2018 and the autumn of 2020; even at the most recent, some of the songs here are over two years old. Such gestation is no bad thing.
Dexter, a former member of justifiably much-touted Dublin band Spies (which, perhaps fortuitously, split up in 2020 one month before Covid kicked the stuffing out of us), has delivered an exceptionally crafted collection of songs. Whether or not some had already been earmarked for his former band is debatable, but what isn’t is how he has managed to invest these songs with levels of art/pop experimentation you thought had evaporated. These layers (also reflected on the album cover artwork) virtually define the meaning of the word ‘texture’ – this is pop music formed not with stereotypical bells and whistles but with painstakingly designed soundscapes.
Produced by Tandem Felix’s David A. Tapley, tracks such as I’ll be Ready (have synthesisers ever sounded so supple?), I’ll be With You and You Make Me Feel (a pair of lost Beach Boys classics mixed with a tangy whiff of Perfume Genius), and Come Back Again (an exquisite instrumental that evokes Nils Frahm swapping wonky semiquavers with Brian Eno) bode well for future work from this most self-assured of musicians.
