Lovejoy: England Made Me EP

The joy in Lovejoy’s EP is not the joy of a gospel choir, it’s more of a faded fin de siècle sunniness sustained by a wall of spangled keyboard hum and series of ascending chords and notes that wash over you in waves. When the lead singer tells us in the title song that England is suffocating him, he offers up the news mildly, in the tone of one who is resigned to a long life of uneventful irony. Temperamentally speaking, it’s the opposite of punk. At a little under 20 minutes England Made Me is a nice length, long enough to immerse a sympathetic audience in the warm bath of Lovejoy’s keyboards and the humanistic squeak of a finger on a guitar string, but not so long that an easily irritated listener has time to feel bored by its starry murmur and switch the EP off.