Marcel Wave 
If The Kinks wrote an elegy for the buttoned down boredom of pre-war Britain, Marcel Wave have come along to scrape the post-industrial nostalgia off the shoes of their sons ‘n daughters. The Village Green has fallen, but the Wave is here to prop up the Chalk Stream Runoff Preservation Society. Bringing together members of Sauna Youth and Cold Pumas, the band runs lingering feelings of restless angst against the nagging knowledge of societal collapse and planetary decline. Cracked concrete and shoddy housing, the chafe of the rural and the industrial, and a parlor of panic are on the dock for Something Looming. Loom it does, and the band gives that anxiety an aural outlet. A nail-bitten bile that courses through the record, smudged over with hooks, but peeking through every crack and crevice.
Straddling the line between post-punk and synth wave, the band pulls riffs taut and softens the strangle with the faint perfume of keys. Tense or tender, the songs are all buoyed by Maike Hale-Jones’ perfectly acidic delivery. She drills down their dirge with a level stare, a tone that feels accusatory, but also mid-sigh, as if she knows the fight’s for naught. The band rattles the rags that have been left behind for current generations to sort out. They run bleak, but with a biting wit and a wobbled glee that’s hard to deny. Probably just the sort of thing we need to get us through the mire.