#SRCZ Music Review // Dignan Porch – Observatory

Listening to Observatory, the third album from Dignan Porch release on Brighton independent label Faux Discx, you can’t help but feel they could soundtrack a lazy day in the current run of hazy, sunshine filled days very well. We’ve been enjoying the album over self-made ice coffees in #SRCZ and finding they go very well with the band’s laid back musical choreography indeed.

Opening with Forever Obscured, with some stabs of amiable synth and guitar chords guiding the listener to a power fuelled chorus, the album makes a perfect opening gambit. Not too slow, not too overblown, the track gets you in the mood perfectly, not afraid of throwing in a blast of guitar riff to get the mind working. Then comes Deep Deep Problem, a track somewhere between sixties styled Psych melodics and a particularly happy grunge vibe imbued with folky stabs of keyboards. An excellent opening duo, for sure!

The album continues its twelve track journey with more MiDi fuelled journeys into Psychedelia, highlights including Between The Trees and the stop and start introduction of Wait & Wait & Wait. It has to be said that this album grows on you, and despite it not jumping out of the air in one of those instant fan making moments the love is certainly there. We’d say, in fact, that rather than jumping out on you, Observatory is better as a grower, allowing the listener to indulge in the listening process.

Perhaps this follows the pattern of the album’s creation, in a large, cold and cheap flat in South London over many evenings and weekends. This kind of music is never instant; it’s an organic process that informs the creative flow accordingly. One of our favourite tracks, by the way, is the Psych-reverb delight of I Plan To Come Back, oozing with a understated bittersweet taste that makes the sing even more of a treat.

Do we plan to come back to this album? Oh Yes.

(S.Gahan)