Something Looming is the first release from London’s Marcel Wave (featuring members of Sauna Youth and Cold Pumas) and what a thoroughly well-realised debut it proves to be.

Taut, clean guitars and a swinging, supple rhythm section provide the perfect foundation for the more esoteric elements of the band’s sound – organ and vocals.  The former veers from the jauntily uplifting to the jarringly discordant, injecting each track with its own distinctive atmosphere.  The latter take centre stage throughout, wryly observed and largely spoken word, they blend the melodically impassioned with the coldly angry and elegiacally poetic to memorable effect.

The buoyantly infectious Barrow Boys delves into the redevelopment of London’s Docklands, which established the template for selling off public land at a discount to developers – fuelling the city’s relentless exploitation by real estate capital (‘Have you ever had anything slip through your hand, like a grain of sand?’).  Similarly, the darkly brooding Where There’s Muck There’s Brass tells the tale of notorious Yorkshire architect / developer, John Poulson, who was jailed for corruption in 1974 (‘Had grubby fingers in many pies, bought off council officials, to build shoddy houses, houses that didn’t last’), and his bleak legacy in Bradford.

Discount Centre is a brilliantly off-kilter evocation of the urban edgelands that have subsequently emerged (‘I’m tired of all this greyscale, and drab retail parks’), and the hollowed-out town centres that then result are summoned in Great British High St (‘I used to go to Wimpy, eat with a knife and fork’).  Meanwhile, the uneasily discordant Mudlarks (‘What’s lost is recovered by time, a lapping wave, a careful eye’) and the vibrantly pulsating Stop/Continue (‘Now it laughs as it glides past, the ruins of our industrial past’) elicit voices from our history through the banks of the River Thames and deindustrialisation respectively.  And all rounded off with the band’s own rather stunning artwork.