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Wave Machines release their second album ‘Pollen’. Working with producer Lexxx (Wild Beasts, Bjork, Arcade Fire, Goldfrapp), who produced and mixed the album alongside the band, this long awaited follow-up to debut offering 'Wave If You’re Really There' reveals a darker, more nuanced vision.

'Counting Birds' sets the scene with its epic synth strings, crunching beats and uplifting harmonic vocals. Recent single 'Ill Fit' tips its hat to the current wave of white-boy soft-pop / electro-funk outfits, adding liquid syndrums, choppy machine rhythms, and a killer falsetto vocal to the mix.

Elsewhere, 'I Hold Loneliness' alloys further kinetic beats with a thoroughly blissed-out pop chorus, while 'Home'’s scrubbed guitars, rhapsodic chorus and busy drums suggest a Merseyside Arcade Fire. The old-school drum box and lullaby vocals of 'Unwound', meanwhile, recall the solo work of The Sea and Cake’s Sam Prekop.

The beats recede for the title track, a eulogy to the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in the tides of Morecombe Bay in 2004. Its gentle, waltz-time electric guitar arpeggios and mournful harmonium tones are instantly arresting and prove a poignant foil for Bruzon’s careful, non-sententious lyrics. These touchingly contrast the “hard bodies” of Antony Gormley’s iron figure Another Place sculptures (located in nearby Crosby Sands) with the “soft bodies” of the dead Chinese workers.

Simultaneously intimate and epic, haunting and direct, ‘Pollen’ takes the sonic palette the band developed on their debut and simultaneously expands it and makes it denser.