In This Light is a slight change from previous releases with drums and guitars more prominent, their familiar loose dreamy ambience channelled into a more focussed shoegaze-y sound. Opening track ‘Easy Goes It’ sets this tone, E&M’s trademark sound boosted with conspicuous percussion. ‘What’s Your Secret?’ continues in a similar vein, some Nintendo-style electronics adding bleeps and bloops to the cacophony at opportune moments. 

With drums leading a plethora of other instruments and samples, it might be expected that In This Light is a disorderly riot of different noises. The opposite is true, with E&M getting a good grip on each song, keeping them succinct and tight, each sound relevant and necessary. Even the tracks that do feel a little looser, such as ‘You Never Know’, are relatively short. Indeed, no song exceeds the four minute mark, meaning that the self-indulgence of some ambient and shoegaze, where it feels the artist is having just too much fun to stop, is avoided. This is furthered by the inclusion of tracks like ‘Holding Onto Light’, restrained and wistful songs that take the foot off of the gas and break up the noisier tracks.

The end result, whether you want to call it shoegaze or dream pop or folktronica, is an experimental album where the experiments were conducted before recording, where the artists are not riffing on their ideas but presenting a complete and structured album.

You can buy the album on a pay-what-you-can basis via the Eric & Magill bandcamp page.

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