MEISHI SMILE – LUST

Oh goddd this like everything else has taken ages to actually get from my ears to my brain to my fingers to the keyboard. It was released over a month ago. What is "it"? God damn— it's Meishi Smile with his debut album Lust. Yes indeed it's "The 1st Album" – there can never be another one by Meishi Smile, no no nope. This is the 1st album and it always will be.

But what is it like? Lust is essentially a mix of rough and smooth, a mix of harsh self-berating distortion and endless reverb free-floating out into the gulf of digital voids, all beset with J-pop sensibilities; it's sugar-coated white noise, it's dance music for bedroom dwellers and indoors inclined individuals, it's idealised. Within its 8 tracks, there are many moments where it soars past the boundaries of euphoria with a post-Balearic furore, too happy to be real; a gentle, dream-induced kind of EDM, not the type you'd hear in a massive tent at a festival, but the type that takes you away to weird worlds in the middle of the lonely nights.

Opener 'AJS' perhaps embodies this EDM style most clearly, keeping all the tropes of the so-called genre – like multiple drops and trance-like melodies skirling away in hookish fashion; likewise, 'Honey' drops in with octave-skipping bassline and clean-cut fast-paced synth melodies. However, here is a quirk of the album: the vocoder. There is something retro about the vocoder, yet in its very nature it IS a modern device. It is at odds with itself. But this works perfectly for Meishi Smile. The vocoder appears as a mainstay of 'Pale', which alongside its icicle-esque synth glistenings gives the track an atmosphere of coldness, of chill in the nominal sense. It's also in the chilled atmosphere of the next track, 'Still' – looping vocoders battling high-register hollow synth and wide washes of dreamy chords.

These chilled vibes start the proceedings on 'Heart', a song that moves between swaying seabed ambience and bouncing electro-dance; thick synth bass grooves in a pop mood and the vocoder seems here to be "singing" more than anywhere else. It's a song of slow and fast. That slowness, however, is portrayed so much better on the almost-surprise track 'Ai' – this one sounds like a super-reverbed and super-distorted version of the kind of slo-house synthpop that the infamous Drive soundtrack popularised with artists like College and Kavinsky (in this instance, more by the former than the latter). It reeks of nocturnal stylings, a simple melody and a steady, driving beat fogged by reverb and underpinned by formative rows of saw-wave bass jounce.

That's in direct contrast to the happy-happy pop of previous track 'Summer Blue', a foray into something maybe you'd find on a videogame – squelchy bass, simple but very effective synth raining down in showers of 8-bit bleepery with an overriding melody played by synth lead and vocoder, syncopated toytronic chords in lieu of house piano for extra oomph. This is in direct contrast to the closer and most crazy of all tracks, 'Tears'. Meishi Smile mysteriously describes it on SoundCloud: "Dedicated to the one who was lost." And indeed, in title and in its near-happy hardcore extreme distortion, this aims to reflect not the moroseness, the lassitude, of being sad, but the fury and frustration of sadness, wholly up-tempo yet down-beat, tear-like droplets of synth raining down amidst the whirlwind haze of twisted grey noise synth.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. There are remixes. KOSMO KAT keeps 'Summer Blue' close to the original, adding touches here and there – percussion, a sunset-conjuring breakdown, droplet sample – for what is 'Summer Blue V2' basically. 'Heart' retains its washes of sound, yet is given a gentle touch of officious industry by Uio Loi, and la pumpkin turns it into an almost beatless slice of bassy experimentalism with added instruments, with the original melodies picked out and spotlighted. mus.hiba does likewise with 'Pale', extracting the song from its up-tempo frame and giving it a semi-trap makeover with added 80s synth melody and waves of trance synth. My favourite, I think, is gigandect's redoing of 'Honey' – now essentially a chiptune number, completely overrun with glorious bleeps, from its low-low buzzing bass all the way up to its fluid telephonic melody.

Phew. Well, this ain't conventional dance music; Meishi Smile ain't conventional. This is dance music hazed over with influences from videogame music to shoegaze and beyond, dreams converging like clouds to rain down startling reworkings of various recollections, feelings, and recollections of feelings. It's icy and robotic, but this cybernetic feel exudes nostalgia and emotion with subtle effortlessness; behind a mist of idealised sounds, just as anybody URL is veiled by idealised monikers and titles, Meishi Smile is there with boundless feeling.

• Get Lust for 10USD by clicky-clickin over here
• Listen to the truly awesome guest mix that Meishi Smile made for YES/NO

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BRETON WAR ROOM STORIES LP

When I first knew the release date for Breton's second (or "sophomore" like an absolute pleb) album War Room Stories, it seemed like an age away. Yeah, and I'd be a different person by that date – maybe I'd be a real person, with a suit and a nice house, and a part to play in local politics; with the whole world changed, we look towards a united effort in space exploration, and I look down at my hands and they seem older, wrinkled elastic. But no. It turns out that a few months zip by in no time. (The) 3rd (of) February arrived a lot sooner than I had imagined. How mundane to talk about a date like this, I'm really sorry.

In any case, it's not like I've been waiting for the date to HEAR the album – that's been done. Heard it a lot, in my car, in my room, and it's fair to say that a) I really like Breton and, b) I think that a lot of people around the UK will love it too. Having been played on BBC 6 Music, it's only a matter of time till they're on Radio 1 – that's when you get big in the UK, isn't it? Anyway, they deserve it. And whilst waiting for the album, there's been a steady flow of tracks and videos, even an EP, released in the meantime. Arguably the catchiest and addictive of these, 'Envy', starts War Room Stories with a bang, a tropico-indie sound, rich with orchestration and nonchalantly yelped vocals, the likes of which appear all over the album with near-intense coarseness that oozes satisfaction. A more melodic example of the vocals is in the dynamic folds of 'Search Party', where the guitar and bass guitar shine out with only minimal plinks from the orchestra, and atmosphere-forming house piano chords; that is until the end where bass gushes forth in brain-drowning quantities.

Where the vocals might not be exactly as strong as they are elsewhere is on 'Legs & Arms' – where they're sung through a megaphone. Maybe I just don't like megaphones or megaphone settings. The rest of the song – a kind of grey day revolution vibe – shows off the 44-piece orchestra with whom Breton recorded this album; rich cascades of strings and bolshie brass blasts, the kind we find on brash, synthy bass-heavy thudder 'Got Well Soon'. Here too the beat, as elsewhere, conveys brimming brutal energy. Recent single 'S Four' gives pride of place to its beat – which by the end is a towering beast of a beat – a fractured dubstep style that thumps below faraway vocals that ask as a simple, looping lyric "How will I be in two places at once? And how will I drag myself out from there?" – add to this rainy night garage-style pizzicato strings, videogame bleeping synths and you have yourself a winner.

Clattering schizoid drums roll their virtuosic way through 'Closed Category', regulating themselves towards the song's end as the strings reach a crying crescendo, a real mind-possessing moment on the album. A similar, energy-catapulting moment is the final part of the final song, 'Fifteen Minutes' – littered with saw-wave bass, gorgeous hi-hat fills and rich piano chords; snare roll leads into an up-tempo crash of sound, synth bleeps playing a buzzing lead, soon followed by the strings – cymbals exploding with the gun-stutter of mental snare and tom drum assaults, ending in a calm of background noise. That fast-paced beat appears before, however, in futuristic and noisy 'National Grid', whose vocals are thickly layered and gloriously laid-back alongside glittering star-like synth leads that lance through the fuzzy phasing bass.

Breton's penchant for hip hop beats, which was shown off in their pre-album EP Force of Habit, comes across in '302 Watch Tower' – a bouncy track which features hypnotising vocal samples and reggae-style bassline, both underpinning a sun-kissed beeping synth solo towards the end. A more experimental beat pops up in next track 'Brothers', comprising of percussive sounds rumbling in thick-aired, dusty rooms, heaped with reverb, like the faraway vocals and ghostly low-register piano. Around halfway through, it comes into its own however, and changes gloriously into a funky, disco number with a beautiful crowd of catchy vocals: an extremely danceable, and ultimately singable, track.

It's difficult to say exactly what is Breton's strength on this album – truth is, it's a lot of things and a lot of things combined that give them their signature sound. The new addition of the 44-piece orchestra gives songs that, perhaps without these soaring organic sounds, might not have the same gravitas as they do with orchestral ecstasies. That said, it's pointless to say that because these songs arrive with orchestra, so that is how they are supposed to sound – hypothetical 'well if they didn't have this then blah blah blah' situations are kind of a non-issue. In other places, the band execute unbeatable moments of excitement – the funk of 'Brothers', the climax of 'Fifteen Minutes', most of 'Envy', for instance – and this is mainly down to the undeniable rhythm with which these guys seem to be partly made of. Composition, and not just because of the orchestra, also plays a large part, with things like 'Brothers' turning from a genreless experimental sound into a tropico-funk disco; 'Legs & Arms' turning gradually from brash to beautiful; 'Fifteen Minutes' and its euphoric ending.

It's a stylistic, at times epic and often dancefloor-led, collection of music, familiar enough to please general crowds of music-likers, and creative enough to satisfy those looking for something new in the world of what is essentially indie music; indeed, it marks – and is resultant of – the evolution in indie music from traditional 'band' formations, adding not only classical instruments, but also elements of urban electronic music with which the music world is suffused: as natural as it is original.

War Room Stories is OUT NOW and available for purchase both digitally and of course physically.

Also check out the YES/NO interview with Breton's frontman Roman Rappak!

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CLARA MOTO BLUE DISTANCE LP

So the time has finally come. I've known about Austrian-born Berlin-based artist Clara Moto for a few months now, firstly when I wrote about her track 'Disposable Darling', taken from her August-released EP Disposable Darling. Her brand of pop-tinged techno - or techno-laden pop - was evident from the get-go and it's still something that makes her sound particularly interesting. As far as mainstream listeners go, techno has been a bit of a black sheep in the "dance" family; disco, house, drum and bass, and dubstep (amongst other genres) have enjoyed quite a bit of crossover in pop music (and as "popular" music itself) from the 90s onward. To my mind anyway, techno has been largely ignored.

Clara Moto, however, whether by chance or by choice, has made a step forward for techno in this respect. Whilst not mainstream, nor technically "pop", her new album Blue Distance - released on Monday (4th November) - not only softens the edges to the often quite stony facade of techno, but it also adds subtle pop nuances that have the potential of giving the genre a friendly facelift.

Songs like 'Things We Almost Did', with its Beatles-like positioning of sitar swoops and clinking marimba type chords, and 'In My Dream', whose soft, glistening synths, vocal hooks and lovesong lyrics, provide a gentler techno sound. Kicks still thud, snares slap, yet there's a touch of ambient beauty that is less nightclub and more bedroom. Likewise, 'For All Reasons So Sad' exudes a certain haunting delicacy: a music box melody and heavily reverbed faraway vocals, with reverse-string sounds alongside, play over sub-bass before a beat complete with bongo sounds comes in; final song 'Lyra' - featuring the aching, breathy vocals of Paris-based graphic designer & singer/songwriter Mimu - has a gentle lullaby feel to it, dotted with grand piano flourishes, washes of synth and a slow, muffled beat.

Then there are tracks that, whilst effusing darker sounds, still don't seem to belong in the club. The lonely shades and almost mournful ambient strings of 'Holy' cover up its rumbling kicks. There's the strong beat and booming bass of 'My Double Edged Sword', with a film-score scale to the song - thanks to thick, soaring strings and ornamentations of altered vocal samples, like birds flocking - that makes it a rather grand listen. 'I Saw Your Love' is another grand number - rich, almost indefinable strings rise like a tide throughout the song as an increasingly busy beat, almost like that of a marching band (the rapid, raw hi-hat here is particularly nice), injects it with energy.

A couple of tracks do however keep things strictly dance-oriented. The percussive jitters of 'Hedonic Treadmill' sit perfectly above its constant beat as unnerving swooshes of atonal synth chords swoop in and out of earshot - the bassline here, a simple two-note affair, is wholly conducive to head-nodding and foot-tapping. 'Placid Kindness' mirrors this track later on in the album with a similar driving beat attended to by skiffling hi-hats yet with a less dark sound, glittering bell sounds giving it a kind of happy, innocent feel.

A good gauge for the general sound of the album, however, comes from opener 'How We Live In Each Other' - which I wrote about in more detail in September. It begins ambiently enough, but soon sends you into a whirlwind of heavy techno bounce, kicks exploding and vocals heady with disarming layers and a Middle Eastern-style melody. It's here where the mix of dark melody, soft ambience and techno-flavoured beats first occurs. It has been said previously that Clara Moto brings a feminine or female touch to the male-dominated world of techno; however, just because something is soft or delicate it does not - or rather should not - govern its immediate association with one gender or another.

Clara Moto has not brought her femaleness to techno - she has brought intelligence, thought, feeling. Blue Distance, a line taken from a Sylvia Plath poem referring to remoteness and isolation, is an album that has been thought-through, a process that has taken place in someone's head, their mind and their mind alone, as opposed to someone thinking only in terms of the club where the collective likes and dislikes of the crowd can sway how a person makes music. Here is an artist who thinks for herself, who sounds the way she does because of the way she makes music - not because of her gender.

It's out now on Paris-based international record label InFiné.

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JACOB 2-2 HERBIVORE LP

"Like all of nature's creatures, the child must one day go exploring by himself," one of the many samples taken from Jacob 2-2's brand new LP, called Herbivore, gives you a good insight into how the album sounds - to a certain degree, anyway. Herbivore is all about that wonder we all had as children, how amazing the world seemed, how small details of things existing in the world fascinated us, how exploration and adventure lay at the end of each newly discovered suburban road, each new park visited, each new videogame played.

Something somewhere said something about Jacob 2-2's music, something about the inspiration behind it. I think it was about classic 80s sci-fi movies for children, saying how they'd all start in some kid's bedroom somewhere before going on some crazy adventure. That's another theme. Not just actual childhood itself, but the imagined childhood of children in the different media we consumed in our younger years - the magical places where who we wished to be with all our hearts. And it's amazing how this heart-warming feeling transcends above the not-necessarily-heart-warming landscape of hefty beats that Jacob 2-2 throws around with rather a lot of skill.

I've written about just one of these songs before, 'Milo De Venus', a song that reeks of homely, close-to-the-heart nostalgia with a fidgety glitch-hoppin' beat, but now it seems quite a challenge to cover all of them comprehensively without being too waffly. Well, the next logical step is to bop over to 'Empire Plaza'; it contains the ticking of architecture, the glitter of industry, straight-talking beats - schizoid hi-hats and brief coughs of snares - that Jacob 2-2 has used to illustrate Empire Plaza, Albany, with its equally straight-talking brutalist buildings. Did you also hear the slowed-down sample of the opening chords of Tears For Fears' 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World'?

'Platforms' also contains another fantastic example of Jacob 2-2's beatsmithing razzmatazz, with its intricate beat bleeding a swaggeringly slow yet frantic hip hop style into the song's magical melodies; looping, chopped-up vocal samples in the second half are expertly executed and conjure a computerised, adventuresome otherworld - wishful thinking for a childlike mind. Likewise - swaggering, stumbling, half-dancing-half-sashaying onwards - laid-back bass and lickety-split beats give the mesmerising 'Red Heather, Yellow Heather' some attitudinal oomph. This is contrasted with the childhood-recalling sample of those read-a-long cassette books, "Turn the page when you hear the chimes…" The title refers to the tonguetwister constructed by varied sampled voices in the song: "red leather, yellow leather".

Jacob 2-2 animated this video himself as a trailer for the album - cool huh?

In the art of makin' beats the hip hop way, sampling does indeed play a massive part. Huge. So it's not surprising, but still damn cool, that Herbivore is packed full of delicious samples. Cut up bits of 90s-esque sounds hold up UK trackmaker Pogflipper's nostalgia-driven rap in 'Sunrises'. 'Lower 3rds' begins with the sample "In 1978…" and ends with the sample "…when teenage boys forget about girls" - between these two blasts the adventurous kinds of sounds that invaded people's heads when videogames first arrived on the scene. Dinosaurs were an obsession when I was younger - I am sure it was the same with a lot of people, seemingly including Jacob 2-2 himself, who in 'Struck Out / Foliage' samples archive footage of a man talking about the way the dinosaur world worked. This is only in the second part of the song, 'Foliage'; the first half, 'Struck Out', deals with the bummed-out feeling of losing in a game, namely being struck out in baseball, samples of "Hit it!" and "Here I go…!" giving the sense of a baseball field in soft focus, plush with rose-tinted memories. In near-heartbreaking opener, '2LTL', there's a child's sampled voice saying, "Boy, I'm too little for everything…" The song has, in its whirling synths and raining bleeps, the wild determination of a child who does want to do everything, despite their age, size, or lack of comprehension.

Feelings and images pop up out of everywhere: in title track 'Herbivore' there is leaf-eating innocence in its friendly bassline and glittering showers of synth (the carnivores can have their sharp teeth and mean looks, but triceratops, stegosaurus, brachiosaurus - they were pretty cool). 'Construxon Time Again' sounds like what scientific discoveries should be unveiled to - the soundtrack of progress - somebody demonstrating an email being sent for the first time; the slow, touching euphoria of 'Baby Duckbill'; the industrious bassline of 'So Long, Solaris' with its wondrous synths gives way to a vision of loss with lamenting strings (possibly a nod to the acquiring by IBM of Sun Microsystem's Unix operating system, Solaris. Possibly not); 'Rm W1' is a hypnotic dose of spaced-out echoing synths, an ambient journey into an adventure-movie-induced dream; 'Snow Brite' is like watching the frozen outdoors in winter from your window; 'Asphyxiation' - the majesty of a single human floating gracefully through space, without a space suit, but still marvelling at the grandeur of everything. There's such a lot that sparks the imagination.

Two contrasting tracks end this delightful album; whilst 'Quarantine Kid' exudes that listless feeling that went with being stuck indoors as a child, 'The Light Shines' sounds like the freedom of the summer holidays and the glory of playing outside in the sun. I think I've said enough. What more can I say? The exploration of the sometimes downright magical nature of childhood, all the entertainment and adventure and wonder and unanswerable questions, is something that I've never heard before - certainly not to the occasionally harsh nature of the hip hop-flavoured beats that underpin each floating synth, each retro sound. It is the clashing of a half-imagined world and one that is rooted in reality - yet in both there is discovery and ingenuity. So nostalgic. So nice.

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CUUSHE BUTTERFLY CASE LP

This second half of this year has been dominated by the news of Cuushe's upcoming new album (or LP as I've anomalously called it in the title), Butterfly Case, and all that went with it, including sneak previews of how the album would sound thanks to a steady stream of songs uploaded from it. It's always been shaping up to be a rather beautiful-sounding collection of sounds and now the time is upon us. It's out, officially, today. It's been available to stream for a few days, but if you wanna own that album physically - and you're not from Japan - you can order that today. Literally.

My first contact with Cuushe, the Kyoto-born trackmaker, was when I wrote about an updated version of her song 'Airy Me' - from her debut album Red Rocket Telepathy - and the stunning hand-drawn animation that went with it. I've been intrigued since then, but luckily I haven't had to wait very long. For long-time Cuushe fans, however, it's been a long time in the making; Butterfly Case comes four years after her debut, and more than a year after 2012's EP, Girl You Know That I Am Here But The Dream.

However I am happy to report that anybody, fans and newcomers to the music, will be heartily pleased by this dreamworld of sounds that Cuushe has lovingly conjured. It is a blanket of close and comforting sounds that, with the very first sounds, envelops you, takes hold of you. Those first sounds come from 'Sort Of Light', an up-tempo number that soars above the clouds in a post-Balearic kinda euphoria. It encompasses, in general, a dreamy pop sound that is employed with catchy aptitude across the album. For instance, Cuushe's vocals are at their catchiest in 'Butterfly' (you should check out Kidsuke's remix), an uplifting number with a fluttering, kinetic beat, vital bass - almost as if its breathing - decorated with with synth leads that scream their existence in between the chugging rhythm chords. 'I Love You' is a pop song whose edges are undefined, whose sounds bleed indulgently into each other, but whose heart remains the same; an overflow of noise in the chorus here perfectly illustrates the strong emotions that dwell in love.

And shining out as a lovesong, but of the sad variety, is 'I Miss You' - there are wonderful percussion clicks here, giving the beat an understated vibe as the emotion of the song takes over, helped by a slo-house feel mixed with Cuushe's beautiful imploring voice. It's almost an obvious fact about the beauty of her voice, but it really is lovely: in 'Lost My Way' she could almost be crying out for guidance, whereas her voice seems telepathically sent from a dream in 'Twilight' (which I wrote about in more detail last month). At times her voice is as much an instrument as anything else, in 'Steamy Mirror' it weaves in and out of the crackling ambience, the ghostly synth, the blur of sounds.

There can be drama in Cuushe's songs, not just beauty. Although, a well-executed sense of drama - flawless dynamism - is kind of beautiful in itself. 'Twilight', for example, starts slow and humble, but ends as an near-overwhelming cascade of frantic synth and percussion. However, something like 'Swing Your Heart' is all drama: a subtle beat fizzes almost as if it's battling against torrents of rain, the rise and fall of the free-spirit guitars and synths crowd the heart and mind with a beautiful kind of melancholy feeling, and the quasi-anthemic chorus of "Swing your heart…" just leaks emotion. 'I Dreamt About Silence' exalts in a celebration of sound, a swaying field of synth - that gladness you get when you wake up and realise the dream was just a dream. Piano blusters and drums fizz; the build up later in the song, dropping with the resurrection of its icicle-like synths, is stunning.

Even the slow closer, 'Hanabi' ("fireworks" in Japanese), emulates the slow spectacle of a fireworks show, heavy echo on all parts of the percussion giving the sense of many staggering bursts of colour. But there is quiet here, too. Ambient quietude can be found all over the album. In some cases it is almost a sad sense of quiet and stillness, as in delicate 'Lost My Way', with its ever-so-slightly unnerving ambient noises, like frost glistening on the branches of trees, and its beatless nature conjuring the feeling of being lost. And in 'Hanabi', although there's the magic of seeing fireworks for the first time, there is the feeling of empty disappointment that arrives when the show's over. At other times it's not so gloomy, however, like the warm, homely feeling towards the end of 'Steamy Mirror'.

All in all it's one of those albums you put on, listen to all the way through, and sit there afterwards in a daze, like waking up from a dream. I listened to this in the car today and thought that it sounded as if we were travelling in a dream-like bubble, the grey day outside passing us like a faraway blur. And also I now understand the title, Butterfly Case. It's a place where dead butterflies are pinned and look beautiful, despite not moving or being alive anymore. And that's the case (no pun intended) with Cuushe's album; she's taken her emotions, that were vibrant, moving, mutating, and pinned them down in her own butterfly case. Although the very moment of feeling these things is not alive anymore, they have been preserved here beautifully.

It's out now on flau. Get it.

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HIATUS FEAT SHURA IRAN AIR [VIDEO]

Here's some nice music. It's from Hiatus - please do forgive me for not previously having any knowledge of this person. If anything, I benefit from not knowing anything about anything by having something new to discover every day - it's good to look at the world through ignorant, well maybe not ignorant and more clueless, eyes sometimes. Only sometimes though. Other times, it's not so useful.

So yes. This is from Iranian London-based producer Hiatus (IRL name, Cyrus Shahrad; N.B. I also found out that Cyrus is a talented writer and you should check out his stuff) and features vocals from Shura - a singer from London whose voice lends a stunning diamondised beauty to the track. It's called 'Iran Air'. The song itself is quite old, being from Hiatus' recent vinyl-only album, Parklands, yet this video for it is just a day old. Conceived and directed by Cyrus himself, it tells the stories of a selection of Iranian Londoners sequestered from their home country, yet imbued with memories of their own genetic journeys through family photos. It's brimming with sentiment - and looks the part, too.

The title, 'Iran Air', I suppose refers to the idea of the air of home being different from being somewhere else, "Underneath a London sky", for instance, as the lyrics say; it's a beautiful and earnest tragedy of relocation that will resonate with anyone forced to flee their home. That isn't me. But I have empathy, don't I?

Shura's voice is just perfect. Each line lilts with feeling, shakes almost indiscernibly with loss and longing. Some sumptuous harmonies make a gleaming gem amidst the brooding futility evoked by Hiatus's mean bass lines and near-tragic strings - the human amidst the actuality of a situation. The general sound, with its flashing synth chords and the bass with its bulging sense of dread, has an urban reality to it - the kind of sound that suits grey streets sodden with rain. Perhaps its more the actual progression of the notes being played that give it a tragic air.

The beat, with something more than a little garagey about it, also serves to place the sound wholly in the sharp right angles of London's landscape. But on the other hand, those oriental strings - evoking a wholly un-London scenario - that loop in the second half of the song cut through the heavy London-ish atmosphere like the faintest reminiscence of home - the existence of of hope. It's a really beautiful song, one that sees Hiatus and Shura expertly combining the touching emotion of folk singing and atmospheric beatscaping of garage. That's as close as I can get to it.

And so you can see how lovely the lyrics are, read them here (credit to Marjan Zahed-Kindersley):

Underneath a veil of night
Underneath a veil of night and
Woken by a storm
Listening to crowds that howl and fight
Governments will fall

Leaving in a trail of light
Leaving in a trail of light and
Flying Iran Air
Looking down on every street in sight
Every park and square

From the only world I’ve known
I can’t stay, I can’t stay
Take me to another place
Far away, far away

Underneath a London sky
Underneath a London sky that’s
Lower by the day
Working someone else’s nine-to-five
For someone else’s pay

Living for a secret sign
Living for a secret sign and
Dreaming Iran Air
Looking up at every passing flight
Every one a prayer

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