Sometimes it’s just too hard to get over those horrible Valentine’s Day experiences. You fervently squint your eyes to try and blank out some of the horrendously childish things you’ve done, or those evenings that just didn’t pan out the way you’d hoped. After all, we’re all supposed to be ‘anti’ the entire premise of this charade, and yet are ensconced in a world of reminders at just how vital this one day is to your love life. Well, without the nostalgic make up, good or bad, you wouldn’t be the person you are today – remember that. It’s all character building, eh? And whether you may be lonesome tonight or in the heart of someone else, there will be a soundtrack to what you do and where you do it, and that could well be comfort enough. So whether Echo Lake had their eye on this very day to release their debut EP into the world is for cynics amongst us to discuss at peril – what cannot be ignored, however, is just how relevant and thought provoking their sound is to this perilous and oft-synthetic time of year.

From the initial murmurs of guitar noise on opener ‘Sunday Evening’, the waves of delay, the pluck of every string and the salacious juxtaposed melodies reel you into a world based on heart-wrenching memory – maybe not always fond, but always important. As the song snaps in with a striding drum beat and choral chimes of lead guitar melodies, you’d be almost forgiven to think that some Ian Brown wannabe was set to storm in on this ornate dreamscape and ruin the experience for all and burst these intricately composed thought bubbles. Instead, an angelic vocal of increasingly layered beauty swims its way around and through the engulfing whole, clasping on to your hand and stringing you through the mist as you float through the aural delights of this first chapter of Young Silence.

Now, while it may seem a bit hyperbolic with all those metaphors firmly in place, you’d be hard pressed to find other words, superlative or otherwise, to describe it. From that point in, Young Silence, in its whole and in its momentary nature, manages to play with a spectrum of emotions through an immense tableaux of sounds, noises and melodies that can only be compared to the hopelessly romantic cortexes of your brain. It’s as if all of the visual stimuli that you may have ever been impassioned about has been filtered into a soundtrack of the perfect, 80s teen film that only exists in your head.

Appropriately, second track ‘In Dreams’ follows on from that initial ocean of noise and ever so slightly slows down the tape reel, leaving those aforementioned apparitional vocals to whip you into a romantic hypnosis before being subtly lifted to a new high by percussive shakes and synthesised stabs of organs. ‘Everything Is Real’ then leads you to a slumber-within-slumber – it could even be a sonic reinterpretation of a slow dance for Marty McFly, leaving you on the loving periphery of a beautiful moment that you know can be real but is painfully untouchable within the ether you reside in. It’s only once lead single ‘Young Silence’ reinvigorates the senses with its popping candy opening of hazy noise and infectious chorus – with its beautifully raw and aching vocal – that your heartbeat starts to race again, replenished by a new lease of life or love or whatever sees you transfixed to this gloriously innocent cry for attention.

Once the repetitions of ‘Buried At Sea’s Berlin-like walking basslines close down under a shroud of whimsically beautiful piano lines that, you are left with only your own thoughts once more. Only those thoughts have suddenly been realigned into a string of only the happiest available to you, leaving you with a companion that isn’t watered down by any precursor attempts at somehow marketing the love you have. Echo Lake seem to already be masters of this peak and trough depiction of love and warping your romantic beliefs into something unimaginable before immersing yourself into their music. Demonstrating such a talent within the space of a five track EP is no mean feat and it would be a cliche to say that “Here, we have a set of songs that you will be sure that you’ve heard before…”. Somehow they’ve done that very thing without feeling contrived or weighed down by their memories whilst massaging those of their listeners into a higher state of comfort and near-bliss.

Releasing this EP on Valentine’s Day, then, seems amazingly appropriate as it is an EP, like those memories, that will be hard to forget.

Listen to Young Silence EP