London Clay - Private View LP

Becoming engrossed by the debut album by London Clay has made me think about the working class origins of synth-pop. How it was easier to transport a synthesizer from the post-war public housing flat to the venue via the tube, than a guitar amp. 

While The New Romantic movement used glamour and aspirationalism to escape Keynesian drabness, sometimes parodying the new-rich corporate society (or something like that), London Clay feels like a response to our present moment where the social landscape has been hollowed out by finance.

I often find punk-adjacent synth-based post-punk to be a bit more focused on aesthetic execution, with little concept or conjuring an odd-world atmosphere. London Clay, I think might be the best skewed British synth-pop since The Bomber Jackets. Minimal in sound, dense in ideas, gets the imagination going. 
 
The less “pop” moments stir something up like the post-Shadow Ring project Call Back The Giants. That ghostly post-Broadcast sound as favoured by World Of Echo, Boomkat etc is here, but with an amateur tinkerer quality you’d expect from a duo in the Hygiene extended universe. Our current conditions won’t give us another ‘Dare’ or ‘Upstairs At Eric’s’, but I’m thoroughly thankful we’ve got ‘Private View’. — Nic