The opener does the heavy lifting of induction, ushering the listener into the room via some unnamed, faintly sinister guide. Heffernan has spoken of steeping himself in Shelley and Coleridge before writing it, and the debt shows without becoming embarrassing: the lyric leans on Gothic atmosphere rather than pilfering its vocabulary, all shadow and threshold and the prickle of being watched by something with better taste than you. Plenty of records promise to take you somewhere; few bother to build the doorway first. This one does, and you believe you have stepped through it before the first chorus arrives.<\/p>
What follows resists the temptation to over-explain its own premise. Each track behaves like an exhibit rather than an essay about an exhibit \u2014 odd little instrumental choices surface and vanish (a music box figure here, a smear of detuned strings there) the way an actual curiosity might catch your eye in a case before you move along to the next one. Heffernan’s gift, audible across these eleven tracks, is for treating texture as narrative: a song doesn’t need to tell you it’s about decay if the arrangement itself sounds faintly mildewed.<\/p>
The genre-hopping that has defined Pocket Lint’s earlier work hasn’t been abandoned so much as disciplined. Folk filigree rubs against music-hall theatrics; a track that opens like a hymn curdles into something closer to a fairground waltz gone slightly wrong. Heffernan reportedly arrived at this whole project after a summer spent carving amethyst cameos on his balcony, and you can hear that same patient, slightly obsessive handiwork in the production \u2014 nothing here sounds rushed, and nothing sounds machined either. The seams show, deliberately, like tool marks left in stone.<\/span><\/p> *Wunderkammer* doesn’t ask to be your favourite album of the year; it asks to be returned to, the way you’d revisit a museum case you walked past too quickly the first time, curious about the small unlabelled object tucked in the corner. Heffernan has made something genuinely strange and genuinely tender at once, a record that treats whimsy as a serious tool rather than a costume. Pocket Lint, four years into this strange little project, sounds for the first time like he knows exactly what’s in his own pockets \u2014 and exactly how to lay it all out for you to admire.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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