“The car smells like piss” opens Sloping’s debut album, a half hour long slice of late night guitar strumming and warm tones. The gentle sounding nature of the record is more suited to winding the day down by low light than giving you a kick in the seat of the pants. It certainly benefits from listening with headphones or you may find it prone to hiding too much in the background. If indie blokes with guitars is your thing you’ve probably heard your fair share of this kind of album, from Owen through to Elliott Smith and plenty more in between and beyond. It also reminds me quite a bit of Row Ewing’s band New Ruins.
It can be tough sometimes to let a record like this impress you on its own merits, however if you can put any pre-conceptions aside this is a well crafted and delivered album of personal reflection. It is an album absent of any bombast, entirely comfortable with its soft sound, burying its depths in the lyrics that you may have been letting drift by.
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