Building A New Town vinyl

After his last LP The Nation's Most Central Location, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan changes tack with Building A New Town. While the former album was bitterly retro-modern and ironically hauntological - reflecting the grim "realities" of urban decay, accelerated by the last half-Century's neoliberal experiment, as has much of his work has done up until now - Building A New Town implies a more fantastic idyll, a self-built dreamworld where real consensus and timber-founded democracy truly take precedent. More Walter Segal than Margaret Thatcher, this is a shorter album of pristine guitars and dulcimers, with the likes of 'A Fresh Dawn For North Cheshire', 'The View From Halton Castle' and 'Solid Foundations' getting at an almost Medieval peace-state in guitar and Moog, a paean to unshackling oneself from ghastly relations of power. Still, though, the haunting scar of the past remains rooted in the music as ever; this time it's heard in the album's whistly, far-away synthwork, which glides over each guitar progression like a fading spectre.