Loma ★★★★
Ghostly delights: Loma go beyond on their third LP.
How Will I Live Without A Body?
SUB POP. CD/DL/LP
Far-flung trio give a masterclass in atmospherics.
AT TIMES, Loma’s singular, filmic third LP feels as much M.R. James ghost story as album. Largely recorded in a former coffin-maker’s workshop in snowbound Dorset, it’s coloured by found-sounds and a delicious, often hushed claustrophobia, leaking pipes, obsolete answerphone messages and natural world sounds bleeding across ambient piano, spidery woodwind and impressionistic guitars. Reunited here to explore themes of loss, isolation and agoraphobia, poised singer Emily Cross and multi-instrumentalists Dan Duszynski and Jonathan Meiburg are normally based in the UK, US and Germany, respectively, but How Will I Live… feels like a portal to some esoteric beyond, where minimal jazz, obtuse indie and folk-horror collide. Ominous, calmly-executed highlights I Swallowed A Stone, Unbraiding and How It Starts are marvels of world-building; magical, almost mystical spaces you could imagine Mark Hollis or Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man inhabiting.