The Long Lost is the sound of love--on so many levels and in so many ways that it"s hard to list them. Imagine Nico had left The Velvet Underground and decided to relocate to California with Caetano Veloso. And imagine that the pair then slipped through a time portal while high on mescalin and came "round in the late noughties, with the kind of production twists that era would allow. Imagine most of all their beautiful attempt to write and make a new popular music about love was completely sincere, utterly lacking in guile, and full of all the queasy, wonderful, sometimes awful overwhelming emotions. The opening single, The Art of Kissing, sets the mood. Acoustic guitar, brushed drums, Laura Darlington on lead vocals, Alfred Darlington (a.k.a. Daedelus) backing up on choruses. It"s a pitch-perfect template from which the group expands into edges of psychedelia (Sibilance), ribbons of bass clarinet (Overmuch), epic "40s film score (Ballroom Dance Club and Siren Song), bass simplicity (Colour), feline fantasy (Cat Fancy), music box melancholia (Finders Keepers), nursery rhyme romance (Domestics) and on and on. It"s a flexible format, held together by the simplicity and beauty of Laura"s voice--uninflected, almost matter-of-fact, but full of a strange kind of magic.