Felt Mountain

It’s been a very snowy year for pop so far, what with the weatherman-bothering JJ72 and the glacial midnight-sun glow of Sigur Rós. Taking this most un-summery theme to glamourous, darkly narcotic Cinemascope extremes is this magnificent debut from Goldfrapp, evoking the dramatic majesty of endlessly stretching winter-scapes.

Alison Goldfrapp learned the claustrophobic-isolation aesthetic at the master’s knee – singing with Tricky circa Maxinquaye – and here she inverts it into lonely agoraphobia, set against the impossibly wide panoramas of (writing partner) Will Gregory’s European-spy-movie atmospherics and Morricone/Barry stringscapes.

Each song is an oblique mini-soundtrack to deathly glamour, future-phobic isolation and twisted, obsessive love, with Goldfrapp’s truly incredible voice – cool and flawless as freshly-fallen snow one minute, cracking and ruined with emotion the next – swooping, soaring and murmuring throughout.

But this is not second-rate torchsong Europastiche (stand up Perry Blake, who would have killed to make this record) or overblown drama-queen mirror-kissing (excuse yourself, Ute Lemper): it feels wholly natural, at least in the sense that great films – no matter how dramatic and hyper-real – seem natural.

Highlights, on an album full of peaks, include the down-at-heel beauty of ‘Paper Bag,’ as well as the sombre ‘Rabbit In Your Headlights’ piano and soul-wrenching vocal of ‘Deer Stop’.

An intoxicating, gorgeously wintery companion to chill you and warm you on these last few starry summer nights.