The Gap

It's been five long years since India Electric Co released their debut, The Girl I Left Behind Me. In that time, there have been two EPs from the prodigiously talented London-based duo. Now their second full album is here, running to just over half an hour. They say you should leave ‘em wanting more. We want more!

Singer Cole Stacey and multiinstrumentalist Joseph O'Keefe do the vignette well. They create haunting fiddle airs, guitar hooks and repeated phrasings in an instant, then let them wash away a minute later on an ebbing tide. This brevity speaks of the confidence of this duo, who reviewers have found so notoriously difficult to categorise. Their music harks at folk, has the lightness of the best pop, and the elegance and sense of improvisation of jazz. Just when you're thinking, ‘This is all too lightweight. There's no real substance,’ your ear is arrested by the rippling piano and fiddle of ‘Scarlet’ or ‘The Broken Pledge’ (an instrumental that is surely the opening for a great jam). And then in a flash, like Keyser Söze, they're gone. But it was good while it lasted.