Paper Beat Scissors

The stunning debut album from Paper Beat Scissors has generated a whirlwind of praise, leaving many critics dumbfounded in its wake. There's an intensity to it that is utterly captivating, coming from the core of Tim Crabtree's intimate vocal delivery and acoustic, creating a quiet storm peppered through with emotion. At times the songs like Forgotten and Keening suggest raw and frayed nerves, the former with its strange discordant looping, the latter with its jarring rhythms and squalling lead guitar  lines are verging on disquieting. Elsewhere, however, there are moments of melancholy bliss through the likes of Tendrils, Once or Be Patient.Paper Beat Scissors is not how the game goes and to some extent there is nothing here that is ordinary. Paper Beat Scissors suspend the rules yet perversely everything has its place. Tim's pervasive artistic vision creates it's own logic and sets its own parameters and once snared all you can do is succumb to the way things will be from now on. The careful layering of instruments adds to the atmosphere and where Tim's lyrics lack narrative sense they more than compensate for that with shape and texture, suggesting things profound, or even access to a world that has so far been hidden in some sort of dream state.