Hands up if you’re morbidly fascinated with the Elephant Man! Throughout the ages / last twenty years, a few geniuses have felt kinship with the man friends would probably have called “Joe”. David Lynch made a moving and brilliant film; metal giants Mastodon dedicated the closing tracks of the three albums to him; Michael Jackson naturally went one better / worse / much, much worse and tried to buy his fucking bones. Alba Lua, shoegaze-sunshine-pop act from straight outta Bordeaux, have sensibly taken a step backwards from Jacko, and decided instead to title an E.P. after the one man in history who probably could genuinely claim to not be fat, just big-boned.

The problem with this immediately is that invoking “the Elephant Man” at all is such lazy, heavy-handed shorthand symbolism for alienation that using his image to try and project such emotions is as tedious and hackneyed as when unnecessary C-list celebrities in the 1990s used to tell journalists that the person they most admired was Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa, as lazy, heavy-handed shorthand bullshit for “I care about the world.”

So it’s tempting to try and hang Alba Lua for the same crime. If you want to communicate the pain of isolation and social rejection, try doing so on your own terms, rather than distastefully and insensitively trying to compare your meaningless sense of loneliness to that of a man who lived his entire life in crippling pain, looking like one of God’s failed experiments.

But then… The title track of this E.P. opens with a hazy, gently picked acoustic guitar, and copious use of a glockenspiel, before the track really kicks in, at which point My Bloody Valentine-esque vocals hum “I am the elephant man / And my head is bigger than yours”. This, reactionary members of the tabloid world, is why we evaluate every situation on its own merits before we write two paragraphs of disparaging crap with barely any relation to the subject matter. Rather than a lot of misjudged warbling about being left by a lover, Alba Lua carve out a wonderful ten minutes of Scadanavian-influenced Balearic pop, closest in recent memory to the works of jj and I Was a King. Second track ‘Sungaze’ probably sums up best what this band are about, and is also what we should probably start referring to this particular brand of Euro-shoegaze as. The E.P. was recorded in Barcelona, and it’s Spanish vistas that it calls to mind more readily than those of their native France, it’s the kind of record that brings summer with it wherever it goes. As the nights begin drawing in, it could be the perfect antidote to those post-summer blues.