Some Cast Fire - Home

Mike Blair must really love his shoes. After all, he’s been gazing at them for years now.

The Seas, Starry guitarist’s solo project, Some Cast Fire, is no exception to this. His latest extended play, Home, is a curious entanglement of distortion, on top of which floats bone-chilling melody and layers upon layers of shimmering guitars.

In title track Home, an acoustic guitar provides the closest thing to a lilo amid a soft sea of floaty vocals; a simple, but piercing, electric guitar spikes holes into the rubber while a a tambourine patches them up, just in time for the heavy fuzz to come in and wash everything away.

Steep, thundering delay kicks off Forget, an equally wistful affair with a smidge more snare and hi-hat underlying the nasally vocal work. An eBow can barely be heard at the back, pulling the whole piece along, as short bursts of electronic bleeps inject a sense of spontaneity to proceedings.

The chord progression in Lullaby is perhaps the most interesting on the EP. A confused undercurrent of pedal-fuelled whirls has almost the same effect as a warm malted beverage, but it’s the guitar stealing the show here, even as everything descends inevitably to haze.

Silence is perhaps the furthest the record gets from its shoegazing premise, as Blair instead prefers a guitar hook that appears to have been stolen straight from the deepest darkest Texas. It’s welcome, too, and just demands a female harmony to emerge from its depths.

Those familiar with the work of Seas, Starry will find plenty to like here, the acoustic guitar adding a new dimension to the formula of fuzzy, woolly dreampop.

Home by Some Cast Fire is out now as a free download.

JS