Immaculately produced and relentlessly pretty, Castratii’s debut LP of treacle-slow gothic pop – or “gloom-gaze” as the Blue Mountains group aptly suggest – is difficult to return to with gusto. Perhaps that’s because it’s mood music and unless you’re in the right one (in this case, darkly romantic or, better still, drifting through a moonlit graveyard), it all feels a little dreary.
Or perhaps it’s because on the strongest songs, like ‘Limits’, Leila Moss’s smokily sensual vocals repeat choruses that five minutes earlier had substantially more appeal. Yet for those left pining when 4AD flag bearers Cocteau Twins called it quits in the ‘90s, the sparse synthetic ballads on Eora may begin to quell the ache. And that’s no small achievement.
[rating: 3]
