The Fauns - Lights

CD Digipack

'Lights' is the successor to the Bristol band’s eponymous debut album which, released in 2009 (through their own Laser Ghost Recordings) with no promotional muscle, went on to shift over five thousand copies purely by word of mouth.

The organic success of The Fauns also garnered a valuable champion of the band in the form of Hollywood soundtrack composer Clint Mansell, (Moon, Black Swan, Requiem For A Dream) who remixed the album cut ‘Fragile’ for a limited edition Record Store Day 12”, also available from Invada.

Produced by the band’s own Michael Savage and engineered by well-respected Bristol figures Jim Barr and Tim Allen, Lights pits the 'lighter-than-ether' vocals of singer Alison Garner against guitar work which is by alternate turns both all-consuming and intimate. Whilst the shoegaze-indebted elements of the band’s sound still shimmer as brightly as they did on the first album, 'Lights' finds them imbued with new purpose - see the instrumental squalls which punctuate album stand-out ‘Seven Hours’, or the interlocking guitar figures of ‘4AM’, resonating with the atmospheric tendencies of the XX.

Michael Savage’s exhaustive knowledge of film & sound-tracking permeates Lights; ‘Point Zero’ and ‘Rise’ are sequenced as ambient episodes in homage to the astral soundtracks of Moon and Solaris (created by band heroes Mansell and Cliff Martinez), whilst elsewhere a rather more overt nod is made to film scoring with the motor engine-sampling crescendo of the Tron-esque ‘Let’s Go’.

The Fauns recently toured with French synthwave pioneer College, having previously supported The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Anika, The Telescopes, Savages and Ulrich Schnauss. Early 2014 brings an extensive major city European tour alongside French post-rockers Alcest (at the band’s personal invitation) plus headline dates to be announced later this year.

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