WORTH A LOOK?: ****

Tracklist: Remedy; Waiting On Nina; Sea Change; Fault Lines; The Thread; Removed; Collapsing; DLR; Silhouette On The Hill; Three Moon Trail; Tunnels

Rather than a brat summer, this season has been more Confessions II or Pride summer for us but this understated debut album has grown in stature thanks to repeated play.

• Read on for reasons including where to see Family Stereo on tour later this year

Family Stereo is the ‘folkish rockery’ project of London-based songwriter Blake Watt who we 1st encountered at an east London gig last year accompanying his parents.

We said of his support to parents Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn at The MOTH Club last year: ‘Son Blake proves himself an accomplished guitarist and singer even playing a Family Stereo song and we learn that there is a debut album due soon.’

Fault Lines (listen far below) is the lush and beautiful 1st single from it and is inspired by a long-distance relationship, serving as the album’s centre through ‘images of space, distance, wide open country, badlands, tunnels’.

But there’s much more to the band than that and the videos for the following 2 singles sandwich this paragraph.

DLR (watch and listen above) is the latest single and possibly our favourite Family Stereo track so far. It gives a sense of place – London or thereabouts – and offers an enchanting if oblique meditation on the passing of time and ‘a sense of an end’ to jaunty piano.

Waiting For Nina (watch and listen above) is more doomed early romance to a variety of guitars.

Of 1st single from this collection Fault Lines, a song of the week for us in May, we said: ‘Watt’s voice conveys the yearning of a young Morrissey crooning a slowed down: ‘Young bones groan and the rocks below say: ‘Throw your skinny body down, son’ ‘, as on Shakespeare’s Sister.

But there’s plenty more fine songs here to lend your ears to. Family Stereo play a London gig in September and we’re hoping to join them there.

The Thread was recorded over nine months in north London by album producer and close collaborator Sam Hodder-Williams, who also provided string arrangements and multitasked across acoustic/electric guitar, mandolin, synths and more, with additional contributions from Pendo Masote on violin, Tom Allan on banjo, Ella Bleakley on backing vocals, and George Vaux on bass.

Not quite Everything But The Girl then but rather dreamlike, intoxicating and enchanting nevertheless.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Family Stereo Tickets 
• Have you seen Family Stereo before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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