Staff Reviews

Lonely Galaxy - EP 1

Review by David Renshaw

This could be the start of something very good indeed. »

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Transparent is proud to present EP 1, the debut release by Lonely Galaxy. The recording project of 21 year old North-Londoner Harry Granger-Howell, EP1 is a devastating record - instinctive, intuitive and unflinchingly honest. This release collects the first material of what promises to be a beautiful project, with the Lonely Galaxy moniker still less than six months old. Nevertheless, it is almost frighteningly fully-formed and assured. Patient and minimalist in its composition, the record takes Granger-Howell's plaintive, painful songwriting - a sad croon, a lonely hammond organ, a singular guitar - and builds upon it carefully until songs like "Have A Heart" and "Waiting" become heartbroken hymns, sprawling orchestral pop music in the most ambitious sense. It is never slushy or overly sentimental, however. There's something completely natural, chanced-upon and raw about the instrumentation that jars brilliantly against the songs' classical leanings. Violins cough with dust, the piano sounds more Prince Albert Pub than Royal Albert Hall and Granger-Howell's voice itself is all the more believable for its trembling restraint. The result is a record of perfect contradictions: bedroom-born but itching for space to bloom; acutely intimate but ambitious and anthemic, slow-burning and sensitive but as brave and confident as any record one will come across this year.