Comprised of Luke Taylor and Sinead McMillan, Welsh duo Face + Heel have had their previously released work praised by several major media outlets and blogs including Hillydilly, Pigeons and Planes, The 405, Dummy, The Line of Best Fit, Notion and Crack Magazine for a sound that possesses elements of electro pop, dance music and indie rock. And the Welsh duo’s forthcoming Our Prince’s Quarry, slated for an April 15, 2016 release through the duo’s own label Dekalog OmniWare and distributed by Believe Digital Records will further cement Taylor and McMillan’s growing reputation for pop with an art school sheen — while thematically, the album delves into Taylor’s love/hate afford with his birthplace of Aberystwyth, Wales. As Taylor explains of the album both sonically and thematically “Some of the instrument choices and structures are there to reflect what I was listening to growing up in the 90s in West Wales. It’s both in love with the place and has a sense of resentment at how remote and marginal it is and how every street has a memory of growing up; good or bad.”
The album’s opening track and latest single “Pier Video” is an ode to the art house video store in Taylor’s hometown; in fact, as Taylor notes “Some of the parts on the track were actually recorded onto a rental video from there that I never returned when I left.” Sonically, the duo pair propulsive kick drum percussion, distorted and twinkling piano chords, autoharp, plucked violin, strummed guitar and industrial clicking and clacking with Taylor’s plaintive vocals in a moody and ethereal song that sounds as though it draws from Radiohead‘s OK Computer and Kid A with an equally wistful and forlorn air; the sort of air that suggests the sense of loathing of being stuck somewhere in which your past hurts and ghosts are inescapable.
The recently released music video features grainy and glitchy VHS footage of the band performing and goofing off, superimposed by digitally shot video of a retro touchtone phone, of the woods presumably near Taylor’s hometown, glow sticks, glowing hula hoops and other surreal and random imagery. And in many ways, the video evokes a lingering fever dream.