Warm Ghost: Uncut Diamond EP

Warm Ghost’s Uncut Diamond EP includes three of the four songs from last year’s Claws Overhead EP, minus my favorite, “So Sick of the Sun”. Nonetheless, Warm Ghost is onto something interesting. That something might be described as translating the philosophical, searching songwriting of Paul Duncan — who in the past dabbled with laptop sounds, folk and the combining of the two — into an appropriately hazy electric mist, an almost psychedelic mixture of grooves and textures that seem to have escaped from a dance club, vaporized and returned in a different form, looking starry-eyed and lost. In the middle of the storm — a storm that manages to seem both thoughtful and crazed, pretty and unhinged — is Duncan, often singing with unrestrained emotion, making declarations like, “Let my angst unfold in the water like a hound’s tongue”. This music is both intimate and far-reaching, living off in some way-out corner of the universe.