Most bands ache for the mainstream but Cane 141 crave something murkier: the adoration of the underground. Steeped in glitches, swaddled in concise bursts of digital weirdness, the third album from the Galway avant-pop three piece politely pleas for the love of an outsider.
Crushingly, the underground doesn’t seem to fancy them back. The lack of danger fundamental to Moon Pool is what, perhaps, dissuades its embrace.
In the clutches of an artist with a streak of darkness, the record might have stumbled upon a thread of coherence. But Cane 141 are too polite, too meandering of intent, to bully these songs into a cohesive shape. For such reasons, the Moon Pool feels sketched and tentative.
Initially, it scarcely resembles an album at all. Across its opening third, the project waxes furtive, offering little beyond gurgling chinks of melody, bleary hints of an overarching purpose. It falls to the mid-point standout ‘The Hot Is Too Hot’, which has structure and – how surprising this feels – vocals, to shatter the obstinacy. Thereafter, the mood lifts and, intermittently, there are brisk and agreeable fragments of song: ‘Frisky Disky’ nearly rouses itself to a chorus, ‘Disco Toys’ glimmers defiantly in the experimental morass. Over the closing electro-funk drift of 'Connemareacana' the dourness greedily reassert itself, however. Hamstring by its own reluctance, Moon Pool is a pristine pop vision rendered grimy and inelegant by a paucity of ambition.