Zoom Unit - Sine Cosine Tangent

New releases from this Mansfield duo are always welcome so it's great we never have to wait too long between them. It's been less than a year since Astrocone Copperneck and Cyclops and we've had three excellent singles to keep us warm since then. This new album includes those three singles, a Leonard Cohen cover and a bunch of previously unheard tracks that do more that mould any expectations built up over that time into a form that exceeds them. The result is arguably their best album to date.

But Zoom Unit - who comprise Andy Whitehurst and Andy Pidluznyi - have been delivering for so long now any kind of misstep now feels unthinkable. I'm playing In a Lucid Dream in my FSK show this month (hear the show on-demand here) a track that combines dense electronic backing with the kind of out-of-control guitar thing some bands do which I just never get tired of. It's like taking some kind of sonic sledgehammer to something much-cherished and somehow managing to make it even better.

If other tracks are less frantic, and perhaps more representative of the anticipated Zoom Unit sound, they're no less pleasing for it (the breathy The Stars At Night is a particular favourite) and there's an unexpected delight at the end of the collection when the cover of Cohen's Tower of Song metamorphoses into something so immediately recognisable as Zoom Unit you'd swear they'd resurrected the bard of Montreal as an unofficial third member. Overstating it a bit, perhaps, but I'm prone to that when something excites me as much as this album does.

You can get the album as a CD or NYP download here.