DELMER DARION Vinyl & CDs

Review: Talk about taking risks. Delmer Darion's jaw-dropping second album is like no other you'll hear this autumn. Trust us. Taking inspiration from legendary tales like Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires, the record is split into two powerful halves. On the one side, industrial electronica and bewitching vocals meet in this abrasive but beautiful sonic place that owes as much to darkroom pop as it does experimental synth-dom. Blending elements of shoegaze, ambient and doom folk, it's a place thick with mystery and awe, wonder and, to a lesser extent, fear, and one you want to spend plenty of time in. Part two, meanwhile, does away with what small amount of convention was there before, and opts for an 18-minute spoken word masterpiece, rooted in Arthurian lore but at surface level focused on the 1919 sinking of HMY Iolair, off the coast of Stornoway.