Tiny Magnetic Pets: Blue Wave review – Moods of the pandemic captured

“Self-isolation going up the walls, while out there on the steel horizon sits your mother waiting on your call,” sings Paula Gilmer on the 12-minute-long track Blue Wave I-III. Taken from Irish group Tiny Magnetic Pets’s third album, which was written, recorded and mixed during last year’s lockdown, Blue Wave marries stark reality with cosmic imagery in between showers of glittering electro and moody synths.

Gilmer’s crystal-clear voice leads the charge as Seán Quinn (synths, sequencers, vocals, guitar) and Eugene Somers (electronic drums, synthesisers, electric piano) borrow from the flamboyance of Erasure and the darkness of Depeche Mode to navigate the dead ends we continue to find ourselves in.

On opening track Testcard Freaks (& Modular Geeks), Gilmer dives straight in with the obvious: “2020 worse than feared, this is my place when things get weird”. Lockdown fever runs high on City Sleeps Tonight. On Drowning in Indigo and Rear View Mirror, pre-Covid relationships become even more fractured.

Capturing a moment – or a year . . . and counting – that most would rather forget, Blue Wave lingers too much on the tension of last year and fails to offer any form of release. The album concludes with the misery of Mid-Atlantic Drift. “I lose my fist again in another small window pane,” sing Gilmer and Quinn disparagingly over crashing electronic waves – with nary a lifeboat insight.