From the mind behind the hyper-melodic Rollercoaster Project, and distributed by shoegaze fetishists Sonic Cathedral, the baseline expectation for the debut album by Fairewell, aka Sheffield-born, London-based Johnny White, is that it’ll be picture-postcard pretty. And man alive, is it ever pretty. From the rich, almost Gregorian drone of instrumental opener ‘Grendel (Apocalyptic Visions)’ to the fairytale electronica that closes the album in the form of ‘Sunday Towns’, Poor, Poor Grendel is a velvet pillow of an album. Lead single ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’ mixes 80s synth with the Radio Dept’s more romantic tendencies to create a track that seems tailor-made for the run-up to Christmas.

But the album’s yielding exterior hides a kernel of something harder at its centre. Like its epic Anglo-Saxon namesake, Grendel is, at its core, about loneliness. The lilting melodies of ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’ might stroke your Xmas pleasure centres, but the undercurrent of isolation is clear in White’s breathless, half-forgotten description of a trip to the supermarket, replete with ethereal lines like “The road was full of cars/ But I couldn’t see the drivers”.

It’s this remote, headphones-on existence – ghosting through town, acknowledging the world around you as little as it acknowledges you – that the album captures so well in its best moments. And no track on the record does it more evocatively than on album highlight ‘Wild Meadow/I’ve Been Locked Away’. It’s a rare example of a single track being split into two separate songs for a justifiable reason, as the lush expansiveness of ‘Wild Meadow’ is dramatically overshadowed by its dark, claustrophobic counterpart. Crushing these two wordless compositions on to one track is an elegant, effective way of communicating that fine line between freedom and isolation.

All very Morrissey, I’m sure you’ll agree. But at its best, the album expresses these somewhat cloying ideas pretty articulately (and with the Poor, Poor…of the title, there does seem to be a sarcastic self-awareness at play, if we assume White is comparing his own loneliness to Grendel’s). Unfortunately, the album can’t quite sustain the quality of its best tracks throughout its runtime. When an album is only eight tracks long, it only takes a couple of clunkers to detract from the whole experience. The sub-Animal Collective plod of ‘Honey Street’ and the derivative shoegaze riffery of ‘Others of Us’ play up the least interesting aspects of Fairewell’s sound, and on occasion threaten to capsize White’s entire boat.

But judged on its merits, Poor, Poor Grendel is still an album that, on the whole, manages to be both interesting and pretty. Its charms are subtle and there isn’t much in the way of surprise, but it’s a thoughtful slice of wintry melancholy that just about manages to add up to more than the sum of its parts.