Review: Still Corners deliver beautiful and timeless album packed with ethereal gems

Dream Talk is the latest release from the duo made up of Greg Hughes and Tessa Murray – and it is a sleekly ambient album - a dream pop transcendent journey laced with ethereal and atmospheric soundscapes that immerse you in a voyage to a dimension of the unknown and heartbreak.F

Formed shortly after Murray met Hughes by chance at a London train stop in 2009, over the last 15 years the band has delivered a steady stream of music that is at once reflective, searching and romantic.

And the latest album continues that rich vein of form.

The band’s music often features lush synthesizers, reverb-soaked guitars, and haunting yet beautiful vocals provided by Tessa, all which can be found on their sixth studio album, which has yet again been produced to high standards by Greg.

The journey this album divulges in is very much like the shoegaze inspired Blue Weekend by Wolf Alice as they both weave in storytelling to what is an un-skippable journey of songs making for a distinctive style of intricate layers of sound and emotion.

The album introduces us to its expedition with the track Today is The Day, a predominantly folk based effort, lost to a dreamy melody with notes of Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence.

Ultimately combining into a wonderful introduction of the album as its indescribable nostalgia builds up into a finale driven by synths and hypnotic vocals.

Next, stop is The Dream, a new wave inspired, eternally dreamlike track which immerses the listener further and further into this never-ending dream.

It has a light sensation of being weightless, it is mellow yet sophisticated and is understandable why it was released as a single in promotion of the album.

Faded Love follows on, a wistfully twisted and intimate look into drifting relationships - the track is bleakly romantic and harrowingly beautiful with vocals and production blending ever so masterfully to elevate the song to new levels of an unspoken connection with the listener.

The reality-bending hymn What is Real is next, a short yet punchy track, as it shares the same feeling as what I would imagine walking on clouds would be like - it has a suave and melancholic soul that embraces the album’s dream-inspired audial landscape – and like a dream its over before it even began.

At the halfway mark of the album is Lose More Slowly, a cult like anthem, driven by hypnotic lyricisms and the repetition of “the house always wins”, making for this feeling of despair and turn in direction to course the album to new directions.

Secret World delves into this new direction with its tribe like textures, making for a feeling of venturing into the unknown. This ultimately cinematic exploration allows for the band’s creativity to be on full show, with Tessa’s vocals demanding the full attention of the listener.

Delving into the second half of the album is Let's Make up, the track controlled by an addictive synthy guitar hook, is then matched with themes of repairing friendships and relationships, making for a New Order tonally inspired track.

The brightly sounding guitar matched by harrowingly romantic lyrics of intimate reparations, create a bittersweet emotion and for these reasons is my personal favourite from the album.

With sounds mimicking the dripping of water, the ambient Crystal Blue is an experimentally stunning anthem lost in a retelling of a happening by the ocean. The ethereal melodies of waves crashing, plunges the listener into the solemn seaside.

The Ship follows on from the sea theme by having the song’s narrative surround a ship being a metaphor for being lost and finding somewhere to come to shore and find their place, this mesmerising quality that the band injects into each one of their songs creates this otherworldly realm of unimaginable surreal concepts matched by faithfully relatable lyrics.

The final song of the ten-track album is Turquoise Moon, a thematic finale to the hypnotic trip that is Dream Talk.

It is a visionary yet atmospheric ending to what is a beautiful and timeless album.

Dream Talk was released on April 5 via Wrecking Light Records.