Walt Disco - The Warping

Walt Disco have never been short on ambition. The Scottish art pop visionaries have always been concerned with how they can take pop music and bend and shape it to their own idiosyncratic will, and they take this to even greater extremes on their second album, ‘The Warping’.

With a greater sonic canvass to experiment in, the album sees the six-piece shed some of the primitive scrappiness of the debut for an album full of expansive, luxurious pop adorned by string sections, more dynamic arrangements and a playfulness aligned with deeper emotional exploration. The sense of grandeur and opulence is immediately present on cuts like the swelling ‘Gnomes’ and the heart-stopping title-track. This is very much a studio album, but what they lose out on some of the more raucous primal thrills they gain in the sleek slinkiness of lithe pop songs like ‘You Make Me Feel So Dumb’.

It would be easy for Walt Disco to get lost in the creative possibilities of a bigger budget and bigger scale, but ‘The Warping’ feels like a perfect combination of experimental instincts and a pop sensibility finally backed up with all the tools, and emotional experience and feelings to bring their sonic fantasies to life in their own singular way.