Slow Skies: Grey Skies

Stars: **

On record Slow Skies wrap a carefully produced atmospherics and an effected guitar sound around a whispered, oddly enunciated vocal that damns them to being called “ethereal”.

But here at the Body and Soul stage, in the wake of the more boisterous Eskies, and struggling with absent, and/or malfunctioning, electronics, there’s a textured vulnerability to Karen Sheridan’s vocals that make the whole thing more interesting.

The technical difficulties defeat them, the guitarists play with the over-delicate politeness of men accustomed to being wrestled to the ground by synth pads, but the wonky superfragile sparseness is counterintuitively appealing. Maybe they should limit their palette on purpose.

The sketch might be a more interesting direction for Slow Skies than all the sonic watercolours.